BLUE ROAD: THE EDNA O’BRIEN STORY (TIFF 2024)- Review by Leslie Combemale
Bio-docs can be so tiresome. They were born, they did this, they did that, blah blah blah. Then there are the ones that really capture not only the subject’s unique experience, but also pan out to frame it within the larger societal context. At their best, biographical documentaries not only inspire, but speak to just how much one person can make an impact on the world. One of these is Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story. Though straightforward, it does everything a great bio-doc sets out to do.
One could argue that women, and feminists in particular, will find Blue Road most compelling, but that would be reductive. One of Ireland’s most insightful, fearless, and singular authors, Edna O’Brien published 34 books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She gave voice to the voiceless, what her friend Gabriel Byrne called “a submerged population”. Her sexually frank trilogy The Country Girls, which spoke to the inner lives of young women in a theocratic, repressive, controlling society, was banned, and O’Brien was reviled by many in the public, and in political and religious circles. She didn’t care. She was a fearless badass who kept writing what she saw, including the violence of men and the control of every part of women’s lives in Ireland.
Blue Road takes you through her career, but also shows how it impacted her personal life. She struggled through her marriage to a jealous, controlling fellow writer, who not only forced her to sign over her royalty checks, but claimed he’d written her first two books. One of the wonderful aspects of the film is how O’Shea examines the many parts of her life, including O’Brien’s joy at being the mother of her two boys, and her fascinating life post-divorce, in which she holds court at her famous house parties in London, a place to be seen where she hosted everyone who was anyone.
Many of the interviews with O’Brien, in which she shows the same frankness and sharp wit present in her writings, really give a feel for who she really was, as do the voiceovers supplied by Irish actor Jessie Buckley pulled from O’Brien’s personal journals. Most engaging, however, are the one-on-one interviews O’Shea has with O’Brien herself, many of which occur shortly before her death in 2024.
O’Brien was an artist who literally had a direct impact on Irish society, and on furthering acceptance of women as worthy of being heard. That’s something the Catholic church is loathe to believe; after all, it was 1973 before married women could work in the public sector, and only 1996 when Ireland repealed its constitutional prohibition on divorce.
There’s a moment in the documentary in which O’Brien is asked, “Do you think you’ve had enough help in dealing with your trauma?” She answers, “No. no. no. no. no. no.” Six times. It is her own experience that compelled her to give voice to the experiences of other women, who didn’t have the talent or fearlessness to put feelings into words. In Blue Road, O’Shea celebrates O’Brien. She highlights not only an important historical figure who broke convention, but a woman who balanced artistry with being a loving mother, and lived long enough to be named a Saoi, or “wise one”, the highest honor bestowed to a elder Irish artist.
4 1/2 out of 5 stars.
