Four Letters Of Love (12A)

In 1971 Dublin, hard-working civil servant William Coughlan quits his job and announces his calling as a painter to his incredulous wife Bette and 17-year-old son Nicholas. Meanwhile, island schoolmaster and poet Muiris Gore and his wife Margaret are devastated when their son Sean suffers a fit during a walk with younger sister Isabel. He is rendered mute and immobile and Isabel reluctantly heads to the mainland to further her education.

LondonNet Film Review

Four Letters Of Love (12A) Film Review from LondonNet

Hopeless romantics prepare to swoon at director Polly Steele’s unabashedly wistful tale of cosmically connected soulmates, filmed on location in Co Antrim and Co Donegal with ravishing, picture postcard cinematography courtesy of Damien Elliott. Adapted for the screen by author Niall Williams from his international bestseller, Four Letters Of Love clings to its literary origins like a life vest, with lyrical dialogue that sounds more convincing tumbling from characters’ lips on the page…

Unexpected snowfall is poetically described as “an immense sky letter… falling silent and slow”, and a resourceful wife pithily explains one difference between the sexes: “A woman has intuition. It’s in a place where a man has stubbornness.” Parallel 1970s narratives ebb and flow between wild, untamed island locales and comparatively stifling suburbia. The disparity between these two situations is bluntly hammered home when an islander dreamily remarks that visitors to her paradise never truly leave once they have sampled the community’s simpler way of life.

Williams’s screenplay demands considerable generosity to chug down various contrivances, on-screen miracles and well-timed ghostly interventions with freshly poured pints of Irish whimsy. Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter are appealingly matched as a happily married couple who want the best for their children, even if that means admitting their offspring might have said “I do” to the wrong person.

In 1971 Dublin, hard-working civil servant William Coughlan (Pierce Brosnan) experiences a heavenly vision at his desk, quits his job and announces his calling as a painter to his incredulous wife Bette (Imelda May) and 17-year-old son Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea). The patriarch leaves home for extended periods to capture the windswept beauty of the west of Ireland.

Meanwhile, island schoolmaster and poet Muiris Gore (Byrne) and his wife Margaret (Bonham Carter) are devastated when their son Sean (Donal Finn) suffers a fit during a walk with younger sister Isabel (Ann Skelly). He is rendered mute and immobile and Isabel reluctantly heads to the mainland to further her education under the withering glare of Mother Superior (Norma Sheahan). Charming local lad Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) helps Isabel to escape her crippling guilt about Sean’s paralysis and she contemplates a long-term commitment to match the “hard labour” of her parents’ 36-year marriage.

Four Letters Of Love is the cinematic equivalent of a hand-knitted sweater: cosy, comfortable and patiently crafted with heartfelt sincerity. Williams’s script relies heavily on an intrusive voiceover to convey Nicholas’s inner thoughts as the young man surveys the emotional divide to his father (“There was love but no language between us”) and accepts the hand that the universe ultimately deals him. Cold-hearted cynicism will comfortably weather the gentle storm that director Steele conjures on screen.

– Kim Hu