The Berlinale has started today its 74th edition, devoted to the inexhaustible talent of Cillian Murphy, star of Small things like these, the inaugural film directed by Belgian Tim Mielants and based on the novel of the same name by Claire Keegan – the same author of The quiet girl –, which addresses cases of abuse at the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, a system of asylums that were run by Catholic nuns from 1820 to 1996, where women, many of them single teenage mothers, were forced to perform hard physical labor.
Murphy, who has all the ballots to win the Oscar for best actor for Oppenheimer, here exceptionally plays Bill Furlong, a devoted father of five daughters with a past that torments him and who works as a coal merchant in the small Irish town of Wexford. The story is set in 1985 at Christmas time. One day, Bill discovers that the local convent is, in fact, a cruel institution that takes in so-called “fallen girls and women.” A revelation that will force him to face his own ghosts and make a difficult decision alone.
Murphy always wanted to work with Mielants, who had directed him in several episodes of Peaky Blinders, on a film project. And it was the actor’s own wife who told him about Keegan’s book. “The film is about collective trauma, particularly for people of a certain age. And I think it can be a really useful balm for that wound. The book certainly was. The irony of the book is that it is about a Christian man who tries to carry out a Christian act in a dysfunctional Christian society and raises many questions about complicity, silence and shame,” he said at a packed press conference in which he was accompanied by Matt Damon, who serves as producer. “The film in some way asks the public to care about cinema and I think there is enough of an audience in the world that still does so in the midst of tense geopolitics and financial challenges for the sector,” said the American actor and producer. for whom carrying out this story was “very simple and easy.”
Mielants, who has praised Murphy’s delicate performance, describes the film, dedicated to the 10,000 women victims of the laundromats, as a “personal story, of pain and of structuring the pain of mourning.” Something that for the filmmaker was always the driving force of the film. And he referred back to a “traumatic event” of his own that also allowed him to go through all these different stages of grief along with Murphy and try to get to the bottom of it, so it was like “a personal journey.” Murphy adds that he doesn’t see his character as a hero, because “everything happens by accident and it’s kind of a collision of his repressed pain and the things that are happening in his marriage and the things that are happening in that community.” “.
The film co-stars Eileen Walsh as Bill’s wife, and Emily Watson, as an armed nun. The actress says that when she read the script she knew it was going to be “one of the great days” of her life as an actress to spend that day performing a crucial scene with Murphy, which shows “the worst of what humanity can be.”
For her part, Walsh points out that in her role as Furlong’s wife she felt like his mother, because she is the youngest of five sisters, she grew up in a house very similar to the one on filming and her father was also a coal merchant. In the actress’s words, the family in the film is so representative of the nation of Ireland, and of “that weight, that shame, that guilt and that control.”
