Baraboo

After two nights at the decent-enough hostel in Belfast, I loaded up my backpack and walked back to the bus station, where I caught a bus back to Dublin. It was a relief in many ways to be back in the Republic, even though I had enjoyed my time in the North.

The Dublin bus station was familiar turf by this point. I didn't linger long, immediately buying a ticket on the first bus out to Galway. By the early evening, having passed many many cows on the green hills of central Ireland, I was on the west coast, ringing my friend Fergus' cellphone.

It was a great treat to see him, since we hadn't seen each other in a decade, when we were both back in Texas. He led me back to his apartment on the river front where I would have the pleasure of crashing on his comfortable leather sofa for the next couple days.

We didn't stay there long. As it happens, I had arrived in Galway just in time for the annual Film Fleadh, Galway's summer film festival. Fergus and his girlfriend Audrey, who speaks in a delightful Glasgow accent, had already been to a couple screenings, and they had tickets for the evening's feature, which was at the Town Hall Theater.

They invited me along, and as we strolled along the footpath by the river, I asked them, "So what is the name of this movie we're going to?"

"Baraboo," said Fergus.

The name immeidately brought back a flood of memories from a vacation that my family took when I was eight years old.

"Like the town in Wisconsin?" I said. "Is it about the circus?" They didn't know. I told them that Baraboo was the former headquarters of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

It turned out that the film wasn't sold out, so I bought a seven euro ticket and we went into the auditorium, which was obviously originally for stage plays, given the look of balcony. We sat near the front, and I discovered a fact about the theater: the seats are small and the rows very close to together. I could sit only with legs to the side. I lived in fear of someone sitting next to me. Fortunately no one did.

I found out later that these seats are new ones put in after a recent renovation.

The discomfort from the seats was certainly not aided by the movie itself.

First off, the movie had nothing to do with Baraboo. I couldn't figure out why the director/writer had chosen that title. Maybe she just liked it. In any case, the only thing about Baraboo itself was a shot of the water tower at the beginning of the movie. The rest of the movie takes place in a tiny little crossroads town in the woods (I think Utica, Wisconsin, based on the signage). Nothing about the real Baraboo, or about he circus, which is what people think of, when they think of Baraboo.

OK, I can forgive that gag. But it was harder to forgive the movie itself. The acting was by local amateurs and was of very uneven quality. The budget was very low. OK, I can live with those too. In fact, sometimes they can be interesting.

But if you've read any of my other entries, you won't be surprised when I say that what I couldn't live with is that the story was chaotic and wandering. We get introduced to a bunch of quirky characters, but for the first half hour I had no idea who the protagonist was going to be, or what the essential conflicts of the movie were. It was just a lot of meandering.

Finally towards the midpoint of the movie, I had been able to construct the basic direction of the plot. The main story was about a fortyish woman in this small town who is divorced and who owns and runs both a dive motel and a general store/gas station. The story conflict seemed to be about her troubled relationship with her angry teenage son. There were also subplots involving the relationship between the son and his friend, a soldier on leave from Iraq. There was also a romance between the woman and a local man, as well as a story involving a woman who has lost her farm to foreclosure.

All in all, it felt very much like the "quirky character" school of independent film making, in which narrative takes a back seat to the colorful antics of a bunch of local yokels. It's really not my cup of tea. It had nothing to do with the low budget. It had everything to do with lack of imagination in constructing a decent narrative.

I could perhaps forgive even all that, but what little narrative there was, was all jumbled and out of order. After what I was sure was the climax of the movie (when the soldier is killed and the teenage son goes on a drunken rampage), I was sure that the movie was wrapping up, with the resolution of the relationship between mother and son.

Ah, an actual story trajectory, I thought. What followed was a denouement involving the mother helping out a family of strangers at her gas station. The end.

But it was not the end. The movie kept going, heaping on more story. What for? Well, first off it had neglected to wrap up some of the subplots, so we got more meaningless main plot (after the conflict hasd been resolved). I concluded that above all, this was a failure on the level of screenplay. The movie could have been saved by an appropriate editing, by placing some of the scenes from after the (apparent) denouement to a position more forward in the story.

Say what you want about Hollywood movies, but at least they (almost never) make collosal story-level mistakes like this.

As a result, the movie felt jumbled. I had a hard time enjoying it, or figuring out what it was supposed to be about.

Because it was a film festival, everyone applauded at the end, and we took the opportunity to slip out. I would have like to stay for the Q&A with the director/writer Mary Sweeney (specifically to ask her about the meaning of the title, which didn't make sense to me), but the seats in the theater were just too damn uncomfortable.

The three of us walked over to the Galway boat house on the river, where we drank pints of Guinness with other festival goers. I shared my opinions with the others around an outdoor picnic table on the river deck, and earned the admiration and respect of some documentarians sitting next to us.

The movie was sub-standard, but Galway was a lot of fun.

One other thing about the movie that irked me: every night shot in the movie seemed to include the full moon. What was this saying? I figured either the director was ignorant of astronomy, or else was in love with the full moon as an image, or else was trying to convey the idea that a month had elapsed between each night episode in the movie. I have a feeling that the answer is a combination of 1 and 2.

I pay attention to these things.