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Disco Pigs

Program, Berlin International Film Festival

January 2001

By Phillip Bergson

Synopsis

Pig (Cillian Murphy) and Runt (Elaine Cassidy) born on the same day, in the same hospital, moments apart. Twins, all but by blood. Inseperable from birth, they are almost telepathic. They are also partners in crime, with an appetite for recklessness, exploration, and destruction. But days before their 17th birthday the perfect balance of their world begins to shift. Pig's sexual awakening and increasing jealousy begins to threaten the private universe they have spent their lives constructing. Unable to contemplate the loss of Runt, Pig's unpredictable nature spirals out of control in a trail of violence. The invisible thread between them is stretched to breaking point, the inseparable are about to separate, and which one will survive depends on which one can break free.

Director

After studying film at the New York University Script Writing School, University College, Dublin, and Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design, 24 year-old Kirsten Sheridan went on to receive the Film Institute of Ireland/Guinness Outstanding Young Irish Talent Award. Her first feature length screenplay Honor Bright won the Miramax Best Irish Screenplay Award '98 and development funding from the Irish Film Board and the European Script Fund. As well as writing two films, Christopher's Tenement for BBC Northern Ireland, and The Kid for Temple Films, Kirsten has written and directed several award-winning short films: Patterns, earned her over a dozen Festival awards including the Grand Prix at Clermont Ferrand and Best in its category awards at Dresden, Aspen, Galway, and Cork; for The Case of Majella McGinty Kirsten was awarded the Best Irish Short at the Cork Film Festival, First in the Jury Prize at the Cologne Short Film Festival and Best Short at the Foyle Film Festival, as well as several other awards. Disco Pigs is Kirsten's first feature as director and has led her to be selected as one of the three finalists in Europe for the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award.

Filmography

Disco Pigs (2001)
Patterns (1998) – short
The Case of Majella McGinty (1999) – short

Review

Not too many years ago, more indigenous feature films were being made in the Republic of Ireland than in England, thanks to some astute tax concessions and fiscal incentives invented by the little people there, which continue to lure a number of big-budget productions to the Emerald Isle. Certainly this has helped to train a new generation of film technicians and, drawing on the rich theatre traditions of Dublin (whose alumni worked with Orson Welles in his heyday—and you surely don't need reminding now that both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were Irish-born), a distinctive home brand is forming.

Disco Pigs is a striking debut film from Kirsten Sheridan, who has an immaculate pedigree as the daughter of award-winning director Jim Sheridan (of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father), and is clearly well-schooled in the family business.

She has taken a prize-winning play, first staged in 1996 and cleverly opened out by its author, Enda Walsh, and cast as the male lead Cillian Murphy, who created the role of Pig at the Dublin Fringe Festival, and here brings to the screen an extraordinary feral power and evident charisma. The heightened almost poetic dialogue is reminiscent of Synge's classic The Playboy of the Western World, but in this shockingly contemporary study of adolescent love and obsession, the violence bursts out with an unambiguous ferocity.

A fairy-tale atmosphere is established from the start where unrelated babies, born on the same day in the same hospital mere moments apart, reach out for each other through the bars of their adjacent cots. Growing up in houses next to each other, they create for themselves a private world yet as their 17th birthdays approach, even the casual observer should have been able to detect decidedly pathological traits in Runt (Elaine Cassidy) and her flashing-eyed paramour Pig. Indeed, the stirring of more sexual emotions, jealousy and rivalries, sets the couple on a destructive path through homes and local discos, bloodying more than a few noses en route. When family and the authorities do force a separation, it only aggravates the whole affair.

While Sheridan insists the story has no connection with IRA concerns—and the contemporary suburban settings are far from the nostalgic, period settings of Irish country-house dramas—it is difficult not to draw some rather unsettling conclusions about the state of the Irish soul and psyche from the behaviour of these "enfants terribles." Well directed with understated flair, excellent photography (by Igor Jadue-Lillo,who shot The Low Down for Jamie Thrave), lighting and use of colour, it is frighteningly well acted, and considerably more disturbing than more conventional horror shows such as Hannibal.