A new film about writer Edna O’Brien “cuts through the fluff and grandstanding of documentaries of this type”

The pre-titles for Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story speed through the conventional beats of the late writer’s life and work.

Books banned and seized at customs. Sensational headlines in the papers. Embattled interviews on television. O’Brien is questioned and probed in every cultural arena over her treatment of Ireland.

One grainy snippet of archival footage shows O’Brien alone in the world, wind blowing in her face, squinting out at an uncertain future. Then, a montage of books with covers showing naked bodies strategically in and out of focus.

A cut to the pop of a champagne bottle followed by a series of stills, a who’s who of the 1960s (g)literati and O’Brien is one of them, or among them. The pace of cutting builds and builds, racing to the end of the story.

Until … a cut to a well furnished living room in the present day. The camera is still, now focused on Edna O’Brien as she appeared in the last year of her life. She speaks about what we’ve just seen and what we are about to see.

“Many people have thought I’m a flibbertigibbet. Or I met this person or I met that person. That isn’t really what I am. I’m something else.”

O’Brien knows there’s more to her story than the fly-through we’ve just seen. The film’s director, the accomplished documentarian Sinéad O’Shea, knows this as well.

To this end, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a meticulously crafted portrait of O’Brien’s life and work, rich with a deep feeling and tenderness for its subject.

Connections

That the film came about in the first place owes something to the glitzy 1960s side of O’Brien’s history.

It was Barbara Broccoli, of the James Bond Broccolis, a close friend of O’Brien’s who served as the film’s producer.

O’Brien, who once had a Bond-vintage Sean Connery check in on her after she took part in one of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s acid-fuelled journeys of self-discovery.

O’Shea uses the wobbly frames of cinefilm footage and overexposed shots from O’Brien’s home movies as a way of illustration. When the action stops and we see a still of Sean Connery smiling it’s as much a relief for us as must have been to O’Brien.

O’Shea and the film’s editor, Gretta Ohle, weave together archival footage, diary entries, memoir and book excerpts with to-camera interviews from O’Brien, her family, friends and admirers.

The breadth of footage and material is remarkable. O’Shea has access to family albums, as well as films shot by O’Brien’s son Carlo Gébler, including an adaptation of O’Brien’s novel Night, which O’Shea uses throughout the documentary as framing for the memoir excerpts.

At many points Blue Road goes beyond the look of a typical documentary, not quite into re-enactment but there is a cinematic scope to the narrative and the intercutting.

This sense of style avoids one of the major structural pitfalls of the Great Person documentary. No matter how interesting a person’s life is, talking heads can only get you so far.

At worst, a documentary detailing an artist’s life and times can end up feeling like one long fluff piece. “Here’s what she did. Wasn’t she great?” over and over again.

O’Shea makes more of her subject by directly including O’Brien in the work. She keeps in the well wishes and hat tips but favours the testimonial.

While O’Brien is seen as successful, groundbreaking and inspirational, she’s given the room to revisit much of her life in hindsight and speak directly to O’Shea about her feelings then and now. The result is that we are hearing her story right up to the minute.

Jessie Buckley provides the voice-over for diary entries and memoir excerpts. Buckley was recommended to O’Shea by American screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman, who worked with the actress for I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

In that film’s standout scene, Buckley acts out an impressive dramatic reading of a review by New Yorker writer Pauline Kael of the 1974 Cassavetes film, A Woman Under the Influence.

Buckley brings a similar colour and passion to her interpretation of O’Brien’s writing. It’s not an impersonation but there’s some rhyming with the archival footage of O’Brien and the more recent interviews shot by O’Shea. Buckley brings pain and longing and wonder to these sections of the film.

Early life

Early in Blue Road, O’Brien speaks of her growing up in County Clare. Living somewhere between a make-believe world of lofty fantasy and a harsh reality. The girl Edna wanted to escape into the stories she’d dream up wandering around the farmland and fields near her home.

At home, her mother was sometimes cold, sometimes smothering. Her father was frustrated, often violent.

Descriptions of this home life come back around in O’Brien’s fiction, as we see in excerpts from the filmed version of The Country Girls play out like entries from O’Brien’s diary.

If O’Brien’s girlhood desire was to escape into a world of romance and adventure she got a Monkey’s Paw version of it in the early stages of her relationship with her future husband the author Ernest Gébler.

Gébler had great success with a documentary novel about the journey of the Mayflower. He had been to Hollywood and impressed Edna with his worldliness, as well as his knowledge of Joyce.

An early episode from their relationship is straight out of an adventure novel. Scandal and suspicion has the couple flee to the Isle of Man, only to find that Edna’s father, a local priest and other concerned citizens have chartered a plane to the island to steal Edna away again.

It’s a big ruckus. There’s fighting and forbidden love. In the film, Buckley sounds like she’s reading the diary excerpts through a smile.

Later on

O’Brien’s marriage to Gébler was an unhappy one, according to Blue Road.

Once her own literary career began to take shape with the success of her first novel, The Country Girls, as well as publication in the New Yorker, Gébler’s jealousy and hatred cannot be contained.

Declan Conlon provides counter voice-over to Buckley as Gébler begins to add notes to O’Brien’s diaries. He contradicts her statements, adds commentary and attempts to take credit for her success.

In the film, Carlo Gébler describes his father as the more ambitious of the two “the one who really wanted to go to the stars” – but ambition wasn’t enough.

As Edna’s profile grows, so too does Ernest’s hostility. Some of the diary excerpts retell shocking behaiour.

Ernest Gébler is a classic mustache-twirling villain. The writer Anne Enright quips in an interview segment that “misogyny is jealousy with added dick”. Ernest Gébler is undeniably proof of this.

A dispute over signing over a cheque to Gébler has him grabbing O’Brien by the throat and choking her. It’s not the first such instance described in the film either.

There’s also a section that describes O’Brien’s father nearly shooting her and her mother with a revolver because he believes they’re hiding money from him.

That this violence is so casually inflicted speaks to the world that saw O’Brien’s writing as so controversial. It wasn’t that the women in her novels had sex – they wanted freedom too.

Freedom from the reality of life in Ireland, the darkness behind the idyllic views of the country. Upheld by women’s silence, a silence kept in check by violence.

In a sequence later in the film, O’Shea shows O’Brien a clip on her laptop. It’s a scene taken from a profile of O’Brien in which she sits in her parents’ front room and listens to her father sing “Danny Boy”.

O’Brien watches the scene and finds it hard to respond. “Thank you for showing me that,” she says.

Later, as the interview continues, with Edna in hospital, she talks about seeing her father for the last time. He sang “Danny Boy” then too, she says. For a moment, O’Brien seems to address her father instead of O’Shea or the audience.

At this point O’Shea intercuts to a scene from another profile of O’Brien, she is leaving her family home after a visit. The camera stays in the house and watches as her father closes the door, then falls on his knees for a moment, seeming to be bowled over by grief.

There are so many episodes in Edna O’Brien’s life all detailed carefully and extensively by O’Shea, to write about them here would take a long time.

In capturing O’Brien responding directly to her life and career, O’Shea crafts a film that cuts through the fluff and grandstanding of documentaries of this type. Blue Road proves as vital and deep as its late subject.