Set in Ireland, The Quiet Girl is subtitled. It sounds like the characters move back and forth between heavily accented English, and Gaelic or some other non-English language (which sounded surprisingly Eastern European to me at times), but both are subtitled throughout, which definitely helps.
The central character is a young girl named Cait. I see in a description of the movie online that she is supposed to be 9. I would have guessed about 12. (When the film was shot, the actress was 11 or thereabouts. Which is common. Kids are almost always older in real life than the characters they play.) I don’t think the timeframe is specified, but a description of the film online identifies it as 1981. It’s set in an apparently not-particularly-well-off area of rural Ireland; I doubt it would have been much different decades before or decades after that date.
Cait lives on a farm, as part of a big family—looks like about half a dozen siblings, at least most of them girls. The mother is pregnant yet again. The parents seem not very warm, not very involved in the kids’ lives, not necessarily abusive but at least borderline neglectful. The father apparently drinks. There are indications they are not doing well financially. We don’t really get to know them well enough to be able to say much with confidence about them—perhaps they’re considerably better or considerably worse people than it appears—but the impression I get is that they tolerate their children more than love and take joy in them, and that their attention is more on just keeping from being overwhelmed in financially difficult circumstances.
Cait is on the shy side, withdrawn, but not to some kind of extreme, like you might gather from some descriptions of the film (or infer from the title itself). I think it’s safe to say that she’s not a happy child, that she’s not thriving, that her emotional needs are not being met, that she is more of an observer than a participant in life, but she doesn’t come across as severely damaged, as buried deep inside some shell and uncommunicative. She’s probably roughly as quiet and internal as I was for the bulk of my childhood.
The parents decide that they have a little too much to handle right now, and they accept an offer from the wife’s cousin to take Cait for at least the summer, through the end of the wife’s current pregnancy.
So Cait is dropped off—at another farm, three hours away—to stay with Sean and Eibhlin, a middle-aged to older couple. There are no other kids or anyone else in the house—it’s just the three of them.
Eibhlin is especially kind and receptive to her from the beginning. Sean is more stand-offish, borderline cold, indeed not unlike her parents. It makes one wonder what’s going on there, like maybe this was all Eibhlin’s idea and Sean was against it.
But before long, Sean is also very welcoming and kind toward Cait. It just takes him a little while, and he has a different style—he’s quieter, less demonstrative about it—but both ultimately seem very fond of her and very pleased to have her there.
Cait spends most of her days accompanying one or the other of them, doing chores around the house with Eibhlin or doing chores around the farm with Sean. You can see that her presence feeds their souls, and clearly you can see the improvement in her as she experiences what it’s like to finally be given attention, treated as someone special, treated as someone worthy of being wanted and loved.
There’s nothing dramatic—like all of a sudden she’s laughing and singing and talking a mile a minute all the time—but there’s a perceptible, gradual improvement in her contentment and self-esteem, resulting in her becoming modestly more communicative.
It turns out—she finds out from a nosy, gossipy neighbor—that the couple she is staying with have not always been childless. They lost a son, drowned in a slurry pit.
By the way, I had heard the term “slurry,” and I think “slurry pit,” but I had to look it up online later to better understand what it is. A slurry pit is a large pool of livestock shit and other waste material, collected together in order to gradually become usable as fertilizer—same principle as a compost pile, basically.
Slurry pits are quite dangerous, in that they give off sickening fumes, including some that cannot be detected so you don’t know you’re inhaling them and being damaged by them. The fumes can easily cause you to lose consciousness, and if you do so you can then tumble into the slurry pit itself and drown. (Doesn’t that sound like fun.) For this reason, you are supposed to wear protective gear—special breathing apparatus—when working around a slurry pit.
And illness and even death from slurry pits are not some very rare, fluke kind of thing. Statistics reveal that 30% of child fatalities on farms in Ireland are such drownings.
Cait is not sure quite how to process what she was told, and Sean and Eibhlin look decidedly uncomfortable about her finding out. It’s kind of creepy to her to discover that the clothes they lent her to wear were some dead kid’s clothes, and to realize that to some extent she’s functioning as a replacement child for them.
It’s ironic, in that one of the first things Eibhlin told her when she arrived is that there are no secrets in this house, that everything is open to be talked about, that she never need hesitate to ask questions, etc. Secrets, Eibhlin says, indicate shame.
So does that mean that Sean and Eibhlin are both, a, hypocrites, and, b, ashamed for her to know what happened to their son? That’s not a pleasant thing to contemplate concerning people you’ve been bonding so well with.
But it feels like they get past the revelation, that their attachment to her and her receptiveness to them remains strong.
So much so that when the time comes that her parents announce they’re ready to take her back, all three are clearly saddened.
In the closing, heartbreaking scene, when they drop her off and set off to return to their farm, she runs frantically after them and throws herself into Sean’s arms, crying and embracing him as Eibhlin quietly weeps in the car.
This is a mostly slow-moving, understated film, with only a modest amount of action per se. I assume folks who are used to and enjoy standard Hollywood fare will mostly be bored by this film. I wouldn’t say I was thoroughly engrossed in it the whole way, but mostly I appreciated it and it reached me emotionally.
I suppose the main reaction I have to it is that some people are really well suited to have a child in their life—they love kids, a child’s presence is magical to them, they take joy in nurturing a child because they know that what is invested in a child—both good and bad—is hugely influential in the kind of person they grow up to be, they’re good communicators and especially good listeners for kids, etc. And some people are not. And that there are parents (as well as teachers and other professionals who work with kids) of both types and non-parents of both types.
I.e., there are plenty of parents who really have no business having kids, and plenty of non-parents who would be absolutely terrific with kids.
This little girl got to experience both, and the contrast was extraordinarily eye-opening for her. It’s not surprising at all that she is emotionally crushed by the awareness that her experiencing of the positive side of that coin is to be only very temporary. Now, back in her old life, she’ll be very aware of what she’s missing.
Philo on Movies 