Film Reviews

Bloom

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Angeline Ball
• Details: Ireland / 113 mins (18s).

James Joyce was fascinated by the emerging new medium of cinema, so much so that he opened Ireland's first cinema-house, the Volta Cinematograph, and incorporated many cinematic techniques into this writing. Unfortunately, while some of these might have aided an adaptation of Ulysses, the extent to which the novel is dependent on (virtually unfilmable) internal monologues is exposed in Sean Walsh's Bloom, which runs for a week from June 10th at UGC Parnell Street. Stephen Rea is excellent as the eponymous hero, the Everyman who walks the streets of Dublin lost in his thoughts and observations, and he performs minor miracles in translating Joyce's words into an often hypnotic stream-of-consciousness flow. Meanwhile, Angeline Ball's blowsy, feckless Molly eloquently conveys the blend of coy sexuality that fires Bloom's imagination. On the downside, Hugh O'Conor's wild-eyed interpretation of Stephen Dedalus is too callow to bear the considerable weight of his 'ineluctable modalities' speechifying, the flightier fancies of Joyce's imagination are rendered unconvincingly, and the constraints of filming in contemporary Dublin results in cinematography that is so narrow-framed and shallow in depth that the film resembles a made-for-TV project. Despite those caveats, however, Bloom is a noble and often admirable failure.

Review by Declan Burke