Same old Song?
When I watched the charming 1991 movie Hear My Song over the weekend, it was like seeing it for the very first time. There are a couple of reasons for that.
For one thing it was technically the first time I can honestly claim to have seen the whole film from beginning to end in a state of true wakefulness. The first time I saw it was on Friday the 13th in March of 1992 at Seattle’s Neptune Theater. I was on a date with She Who Shall Not Be Named and for some reason that escapes me—too many long hours at my time-consuming software job? burning the candle at both ends trying to also have social life?—I kept dozing off. Even so, I enjoyed the movie and in fact gave it a good rating on my personal log of movies, which I had been keeping since I saw Paul Verhoeven’s kinky Dutch thriller The Fourth Man at the Pike Place Cinema on Flag Day in 1985.
A digression: Yes, I have been keeping a log of every film I have seen in a cinema for more than three-and-a-half decades, i.e. ten years before I started posting reviews on this website concurrently with the beginning of the 1995 Seattle International Film Festival—and also two years before the 1987 SIFF when I actually began writing reviews and pinning them up on the bulletin board at work because the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet. Having a log like this is actually a lot of fun—when I remember that I have it and go back to look at it. For instance, I know that the two movies I saw previous to Hear My Song were Yves Robert’s adaptations of Marcel Pagnol’s elegiacal autobiographical works My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. I also know that two weeks after seeing Hear My Song, I then saw the late Michael Apted’s sequel documentary about former British school children 35 Up. And two weeks after that I saw Jaco Van Dormael’s dramedy about persistent childhood envy Toto the Hero. End of digression.
I can only imagine what I made of Hear My Song on that first viewing. After all, I had never been to Ireland and had yet to meet the Irish woman I would end up marrying. No doubt most of the local references to life in the rural countryside went right over my head as well as a lot of the references, argot and humor.
At some point after moving to Ireland, I dimly recall watching the movie again, this time on television. I can’t tell you the exact date because I have never logged movies I watch on small screens unless I write reviews of them. I do recall, though, that I did fall asleep again. Perhaps from being up in the middle of the night with a baby?
Finally, on the third viewing I was wide awake for the whole thing—even if there was someone snoring next to me—and the film lifted my heart. This time I’m pretty sure I got all the references and all the jokes. It has lots of bits that make lots of Irish people cringe because of the expat Irishman’s romanticized view of everything upon returning home to the Ireland of his imagination. Still it is self-aware enough that I think it’s okay. As I pointed out in my review, James Nesbitt actually says to Adrian Dunbar out loud that they are in a shaggy dog story. This is no Hollywood-produced Darby O’Gill and the Little People or The Quiet Man.
Dunbar and Nesbitt have gone on to appear in quite a few other things over the years, and in fact for the past few years Dunbar has been a lead on one of the most popular TV series in the UK, Line of Duty. He made a remote appearance on Ireland’s premier evening chat show The Late Late Show on Good Friday, and host Ryan Tubridy brought up Hear My Song, which Dunbar co-wrote with director Peter Chelsom. The actor/screenwriter told an amusing story about needing to get a waiver from the tenor Josef Locke of whom a fictionalized version is portrayed (quite ably by American actor Ned Beatty) in the film. In Dunbar’s telling, the reclusive singer was uncooperative on every point raised—until a suitcase of cash was produced upon which all objections suddenly evaporated.
Because the movie is about nostalgia and links to a nation’s past, it actually holds up quite well after 30 years—with one notable exception. At one point in the film a sexual assault takes place offscreen. It is a shocking moment, but it is all too quickly forgotten and forgiven. Just at the moment we think the perpetrator will meet some kind of (rough) justice, it turns into a gag and a plot twist. In the world in which we live now, it leaves a sour taste. In this regard, things are not at all helped by an unfortunate coincidence. You see, the only reason I was able to see this gem in Seattle was because it had been spotted at the Festival de Cannes by an American producer who liked it and acquired the distribution rights. That producer was Harvey Weinstein.
That may be enough for some to consign the movie to the dustbin of history, but to my mind it is yet one more example of how we live in a maddeningly complex world—one in which awful people who do terrible things can, in spite of themselves, also enable others to accomplish things that are good and worthwhile. In a way, that’s also a theme of Hear My Song.
-S.L., 6 April 2021
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