An extremely sad film showing how in any community in our world, in this case a small town in the Irish back country, there are a few people who are both daily punching balls and born victims. Here it is a slightly mentally retarded man who is doing a small but useful job in the community, taking care of the local gas station. At the pub he is the constant target of jokes and other remarks that treat him as if he were totally unable to understand what is being said. At times he is the object of some violence to take a cigarette from him. And no one protests. He is also used by some older people as the local listening and silent confessor. The grocery-store lady invites him to dance one night and becomes all personal and soft, and yet as soon as one of his finger touches anything else than her dress, a little patch of her own skin, she over-reacts and rejects him in public as if he had tried to rape her. His boss puts a young teenager of 15 in his hands to extend the opening hours of the gas station. A certain amount of trust and friendship develops but he offers a beer to the kid after work and even once he offers to show him the sex tape a truck driver has offered him. Then he becomes the target of a complaint at the police, of a police procedure, of a slandering campaign in the city. He cannot accept it and he goes to the horse in a field that he has often visited and offered some goodie to in order to say good bye we guess, or maybe only hello. But the horse has been tied up and cannot come to the gate. So Josie gets over the gate and says good bye to the horse. Then he goes to the river and walks forever into the water. Don't believe that can only happen in a small town in the Catholic back country of Ireland. Far from it. It could happen anywhere particularly in good old atheistic suburban neighborhoods of our cities with those people who have abandoned God to replace him with some strict and even selfish set of rules that they declare ethical or moral. But what can we make of the final scene of the horse carrying his rope around his neck and walking along the railway tracks? What a sad ending implying some, if not most, among us are nothing but domesticated animals that are sacrificed or tied up, why not hanged, as soon as they step out of the tracks that have been set for them.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines