| BY DECLAN BURKE.
If one thinks of her at all, one thinks of Nora Barnacle as James Joyce's unwitting muse, the simple Galway girl transformed by him into, among others, Molly Bloom.
With Nora, a film starring Ewan McGregor as Joyce and Susan Lynch as the eponymous heroine, director Pat Murphy shines a light onto the long shadows cast by the myth of Joyce to illuminate Barnacle's life.
Murphy's feminist revisionism has served Irish film well, most notably in her film about Anne Devlin. Brid Brennan's Devlin collaborates with Robert Emmet and articulates the unsung role women played in the struggle for Irish self-determination. In that way the film paralleled the struggle in Northern Ireland.
Nora, which opens this year's Dublin film festival on April 6, is also contemporary in tone, despite its period setting. Joyce and Barnacle meet in 1904, she a rural maid who moved to Dublin in the wake of a tragic love affair, he a struggling writer frustrated by social, religious and sexual conformity.
Based on the biography by Brenda Maddox, the film follows the fortunes of the lovers as they escape a drab and dreary Dublin for sun-kissed Trieste. There they struggle with poverty, largely as a result of Joyce's heavy drinking, and have two children, Lucia and Giorgio. They maintain a volatile relationship until the film ends with the publication of Dubliners in 1914.
The film's credentials are excellent. Murphy co-wrote the screenplay with Gerry Stembridge. The relationship between Joyce and Barnacle is commendably frank and refreshingly modern in its depiction of the lovers' sexual and emotional bond.
Cinematographer Jean-Francois Robin gives the production a Merchant Ivory fidelity to its period detail.
The thrust of the film, that Barnacle was Joyce's equal if not his intellectual fellow traveller, is concisely conveyed, and Lynch dominates proceedings as wilful and independent. The fact that the film is an Irish-Italian-German co-production means, thankfully, that we don't have to suffer any Oirish excesses. Overall, however, Nora is hamstrung by contradictions that mitigate against an unqualified success.
McGregor is one such contradiction. While his performance is unusually understated, the better to allow Lynch to sustain the narrative, the reality of star power means his name appears before hers on the opening credits. Those uninitiated in Joyce's life and who are attracted to Nora on the basis of McGregor's roles in The Phantom Menace and Trainspotting are likely to perceive Joyce as the focus of the production, as refracted through the one-dimensional prism that was his lover.
Which leads to a second contradiction: the justification for telling Barnacle's story. In order to bolster her credentials as the heroine of the film, it seems necessary to undermine Joyce. To this end Joyce is portrayed as a neurotic and jealous voyeur, obsessed with betrayal and sexual deviancy, while Barnacle's sexual history is merely alluded to by innuendos that are robustly repudiated by the woman herself.
Perversely, Barnacle reacts to Joyce's jealousies; she is never proactive emotionally and only once physically. Despite this, Joyce is the one prosaically caricatured as masturbating over Barnacle's letters in the projection room of the Volta cinema, which he founded in Mary Street, Dublin. Later, the writer is implicitly cuckolded by his brother, Stanislaus (Peter McDonald), who steals covert glances at Barnacle; realising that he cannot suppress her spirit, a desperate Joyce is reduced to offering Barnacle ample opportunity to indulge herself in an affair, an opportunity she nobly refuses.
Intellectually, Joyce fares little better. "My poor, simple-minded Jim," sighs Barnacle; she later admonishes him, saying: "Even writers have to use the same words as other people." While she protests that she has no secret thoughts, Barnacle gets all the best one-liners in the film. She exhibits an acerbic humour and a thoughtful insight into the human condition that doesn't, strangely, allow her to comprehend how Joyce might interpret her personality as the raw material for his fictional outpourings.
This undermining of Joyce, in the context of the production of Nora, begins with the website concerning Maddox's biography of Barnacle, in which Joyce is briefly described as an "imaginative" writer. It continues through Lynch's assertion in the production notes to the film that "it's all very well to sit around saying, isn't Joyce wonderful, he completely changed 20th-century history. What you really need to look at is how he struggled and how Nora stuck by him". While the film stops short of suggesting that Barnacle was responsible for Joyce's prose, the production notes contentiously suggest that without her, "the world would be without his literary legacy."
While few writers deserve demystification more than Joyce, the constraints of cinema mean Murphy has had to paint her characters in bold strokes.
In order to render Barnacle heroic, she has made Joyce a villain with few redeeming features. Barnacle is strong and beautiful; Joyce is craven and sexually insecure. And while the film poses the potentially intriguing question of what Joyce would have been without Barnacle, it sidesteps the glaring reality that, had she never met Joyce, her story would never have been told.
It's a shame because, apart from a simplistic resolution, Barnacle largely eschews the cliches of Hollywood romances. And Joyce's fascination with cinema - his narrative techniques included flashbacks, dissolves, jump cuts and montage, to name but a few - deserved a more sympathetic eye and ear.
Perhaps that's another day's work. For now we'll have to content ourselves with a flawed biopic that suggests Barnacle could have had 'em all, it was just her luck to get stuck with the most inventive wordsmith in the history of the English language.
Nora is to be released on April 21
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited
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