Perfume of Inisherin ★★★★½
DRAMA (2022)
Directed by: Martin McDonough
InterpretationsCast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan

The film, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, serves as an obvious allegory for the ills of the Civil War – absurdity, destruction, collateral damage – it’s all there.

One of the two or three best films of the year, nominated for nine Oscars, is released this week. Arguably the greatest contemporary screenwriter of Western cinema, Martin McDonough (“Three Signs on the Border of Ebbing, Missouri”) creates here a unique myth that seems timeless and at the same time perfectly inscribed in its historical context. The year is 1923, and civil war is raging in the interior of Ireland. On the contrary, however, on the (invented) island of Inisherin, everything is peaceful and predictable to the point of exhaustion. At least not until Colm (Brendan Gleason) decides he doesn’t want to talk to his best friend Patrick (Colin Farrell) and things start to heat up. Soon, the environment will come into play, the first of which will be the clumsy young man Dominique (Barry Keoghan) and Patrick’s kind-hearted sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), as the situation gradually spirals out of control and the first … blood is shed. .

McDonagh constructs a layered film, inviting the viewer to explore them according to their mood. In the foreground, we have a classic male bromance that ends for no apparent reason, but is clearly tragicomic. Unable to understand how his friend suddenly leaves him, Patrick makes a desperate attempt to reunite, until the other takes drastic, shocking action. The dialogue between the two, a cross between black comedy and sheer drama, is delightful as Farrell and Gleason recreate the incredible duet we saw in Mission to Bruges.

On the second level, the film functions as an obvious allegory for the suffering of the civil war. The absurdity, the destruction, the collateral damage – all of this, together with the ever-present death – or the ghostly old woman with the harpoon, according to McDonagh – breaks the harmony of the charmingly wild landscape in which the action takes place. If, finally, to “dig” even further, then a melancholic awareness of absolute loneliness, that force that stubbornly resists the social nature of man, will be revealed. And he will certainly admire the genius of a deeply tragic work that, in a strange way, makes you laugh almost all the time.