Cinema: Treacle Pud

Time Lost and Time Remembered. "An outpost by the sea, Population 427. Twenty-seven bars, a defunct weighing machine, zinc-roofed cinema. Waves, weed. Potatoes on the uplands, drizzle on dry days. Decaying bachelors and young Helens with church medals pinned to their bodices, eyes down and kicking shins under dusty dining-room tables. We add, we subtract, we do the nine Fridays and the wind blows the seaweed onto the barbed wire."

There is a certain poetry in Edna O'Brien's description of the village in the west of Ireland where Time Lost takes place, and for the large part of an hour the same might be said of the film itself. Manny Winn's camera captures the fairy lights that delicately image the immanence of the Celtic twilight. And John Addison's murmuring, warm-weird music summons forth the cold green spirit of the place like ould St. Patrick's pipe itself.

The plot is another sack of potatoes, however. The heroine (Sarah Miles) is a Hibernian Orphan Annie who in rapid succession sees the young man she loves run away to sea, gets pregnant by a beastly Britisher, suffers a miscarriage in a London gutter, hurries home to find the young man she loves engaged to another girl, winds up on Christmas morning bravely smiling through tears. Her tears fall in such torrents, in fact, that viewers may wonder why the camera was not equipped with windshield wipers. They may also wonder how Director Desmond Davis and Novelist-Scriptwriter O'Brien, who once collaborated on a shrewd, satirical movie about Ireland (The Girl with Green Eyes), could have failed to add a leaven of Gaelic laughter to this treacle pud.