Seachd - The Inaccessible Pinnacle
The first Gaelic language film to go on general release finally reached our not so local art house cinema last night. Having an interest in all matters Gaeldom, we shot off in the car to see it. We were fully aware that our thirty mile round trip would cost the environment dear but decided to offset the carbon by not having children.
This is good cinema and I recommend anyone with an interest in good story-telling gets the DVD, released next week. It is a good telling of a story about story telling and about grief within a small family. All the performances, from the small cast, are of a quality rarely seen on celluloid and sometimes only on stage. It feels like watching a play with hints of an Ingmar Bergman cinematic style.
Angus is eleven years old and has moved in with his grandparents following the tragic death of his parents in a climbing accident. His grandfather tells apparent tall-tales, proverbially but with a believably implied realism. His angry grandson rejects them but can't resist them in his quest for truth about his parents' death.
The story has slight flaws. Angus's siblings are inexplicably absent from much of the story and the return of the perpetrator of the accident that killed his parents is unnecessarily messy. The death of the grandmother, at such an important time in the boy's life, was all but skipped over. I also found the external views of a very large house jarred a little with the small internal sets.
Skye is beautiful and filmed lovingly with no sentimentality. The same is true of the score and the very real Ceilidh scene. All in all, it's a very realistic portrayal of gaelic island life told with considerable depth and humour. Only miss it if you are shallow enough to use the 'don't like subtitles' excuse.
