TWO CHRISTIANS AND A SCEPTIC AT EASTER

It makes for a fine family gathering at Easter: a small holiday camp in the north-west of England, between Blackpool and Preston, accessible by car from the city where the young ones live and by flight to Liverpool and a local taxi for the grandparents. 

The taxi driver is calm, able and an ardent Christian. Our conversation turns to Christianity when I push back against inappropriate remarks he makes on Islam, after comments on changes to his High Street. I suggest the changes might be more economic than religious. His neighbours change shopping habits from the high street to out-of-town malls and superstores. Many similar changes are driven, literally, by cars and the chimera of convenience. 

The driver reads about Christianity and Islam, including the Bible, the Koran and commentaries on the books in the Daily Mail and other aligned publications. He avers that God is Good and that humans are created in his image. I don’t raise the gender issue. I regret that. I ask if he means all humans and he answers ‘yes’. 

He takes the Genesis story as his starting point.When I ask who created the Serpent he says “God”. From there, we stumble through thickets of The Problem of Evil and the use of Free Will. I suggest putting Free Will in an image of himself might have been a mistake. The driver ends by proposing capital punishment for Axel Rudakubana, the so-called Southport Killer, serving a long prison sentence for murdering three young girls. He says he would hang him. When I ask “would you tie the noose, throw the lever in the trapdoor, plunge home the poison-driver, fire the executioner’s gun?” he replies that he would. 

I mention John Walker, one of The Birmingham Six, released after 16 years wrongful imprisonment when he found to be innocent of the IRA pub bombings that killed 21 people in Birmingham in 1974. I say that if his view is taken, then John Walker and many others would be dead. He doesn’t respond.

I put it to him that he could write to Axel Rudakubana and offer him his love, as Jesus advised.

We part on good terms. Our family greets us and we settle into the Easter holiday accommodation.

Nanny, daughter and two grand-daughters go to a swim session the next day. I follow on my hired mobility scooter. I park up and hobble around on crutches, seeking a spot from which to view the family. I don’t manage it and I make my way back to the scooter. I am familiar with these scooters, as I use one at home and hire various models, when travelling.

It becomes clear that I can’t insert the key into the ignition, no matter which way I swivel it. A number of passersby check if I need help. I thank them and they move on. It’s obvious that I really do need assistance, when a man in gym shorts and tee-shirt, carrying a water bottle and a phone, stops. He tries the key. No luck.

I ask if he would phone the scooter hire company. There is a sticker with contact details on the handlebars. I tell him my phone is back at the accommodation. He phones and carries on a back-and-forth conversation with a woman from the scooter company. She asks him to describe the key. When he does, she says it’s not one of theirs. I box the pockets of my jacket and jeans. I find another set of very similar keys. One of them slots easily into the ignition, turns without a hitch, and illuminates the lights on the control panel.

Tears gather in my eyes.

A severe bout of respiratory illness, probably pneumonia, in February leaves me frail and hapless. Even more frail and hapless than from the crippling respiratory and mobility conditions that see me using a mobility scooter, a wheelchair and crutches.

I apologise to the man. I thank him. He invites me to thank Jesus. I laugh lightly, wondering if I am on an Easter Special. It’s Spy Wednesday of Holy Week in the Christian calendar. 

- You are my second Christian this week. 

He smiles and, just like my first Christian, he asks

- Are you a person of faith?”

I repeat my earlier and regular answer to the question.

- Yes, I am a person of faith, but not of religious faith.

I tell him I believe in him.

He invites me to believe in Jesus, who, he says loves me and who found the key. I suggest that he uncovered the key, not Jesus. There is nothing mysterious about a heavily-medicated seventy one year old man, struggling with pain and disability, experiencing lapses of memory and mental acuity. I say 

- I love you, not Jesus.

He says that Jesus brought us together. I demur. I say the same could be said about contingency. Chance brought us together. It’s not a saviour or an open tomb. It does not offer grace, nor chocolate eggs. Good people like him happen along.

We part on good terms.

On Maundy Thursday, two girls and their grandparents enjoy a quiet meal. The girls’ parents have a ‘night off’. The older girl tells of her drama work at a club and at her primary school. She speaks about a recent show; a pastiche of scenes and songs from the musical Annie. Then she takes us through her school show, a live telling of incidents in the life and death of Jesus, as they take place on the days of Easter week.

She starts with the palm-strewn lanes of Jerusalem, with Jesus on a donkey. Step by step, she moves through the week and the narrative known to Christians as The Greatest Story Ever Told. She recounts the tale with relish and detail. She has the Roman Governor washing his hands as the people call for Barabbas, not Jesus, to be released. She asks questions of herself, her grandparents and of the story: who? how come?

She tells about a supper and a betrayal: what does that mean? why? She gets her characters to the garden. She details a kiss on the cheek and offers that French and Spanish people do that, but not so much English and Irish people. People are different.

The little sister acts and plays in her own story, coming and going from the table and her half-empty plate, asserting contradictions: I finish. I hungry.

We get to the three men crucified: why three? She describes Jesus’ mother and other women. She describes the soldiers, one of whom she played in the school play. She gets us to the tomb, the empty tomb, the people amazed.

She is not amazed. She is enthralled and full of questions, as she is with many of the stories she hears. Her Nanny comments that if she remembers the geography and history stories she’ll be told at school, she’ll have no bother.

I am delighted. Stories are important to me. They are the structured imaginings with which I explain the world and my experiences to myself.

The storyteller leaves an empty plate and the table. She joins her sister at a jigsaw, until they bicker and the grandparents distract them with fruit and a biscuit. After all, they are human, in their own image. They suffer pain. They inflict pain. They salve pain. Pain unites them and us. Including the two men I met. 

I wish us well, as Easter marks brighter mornings, more heat and a Spring in our gloriously human steps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on3M7YWlewo

Film trailer: The Greatest Story Ever Told

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

PROBLEMS OF LEGACY ARE PROBLEMS OF NOW

Radio talk shows are full of speakers who default to the intractability of ‘Problems of Legacy’, when discussing social and political difficulties that bedevil citizens in Northern Ireland today. 

The war between state forces, their allies and anti-state paramilitaries left great wounds. Grieving families, mutilated bodies, devastated infrastructure and social schisms in the aftermath of grim violence perpetrated by a range of combatants did not lead to formal resolution of the underlying causes. They produced a cessation of violence and a precarious peace process that was very welcome, but inherently fragile, despite agreements in 1998 and 2006.

One key source of conflict was the manner in which the state enacted policing on its citizens. Policing is the iron fist of state power delivered at citizen level. It presumes the consent of the citizenry, a challenging presumption all over the world.

In Northern Ireland intense debate produced proposals to create a service from the existing force, in 2001. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was stood down and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was formed. It has new powers, badges, protocols and a whole new recruitment process known as 50-50, a form of positive action seen in different jurisdictions. It sought to draw people from the Nationalist/Irish/Roman Catholic elements of the community in the face of the preponderance of members from Unionist/British/Protestant members of the community.

This was an understandable, but crude and contested response to the need for change. As society changes, it has proven inept in tilting the recruitment balance to an even keel. 50-50 was dropped in 2011. Calls for its return are made at present, because recruitment into the PSNI remains stubbornly below the desired figures. 

Various reasons for the recruitment problem are cited by politicians and others on the radio talk shows. They are invariably bundled as ‘Problems of Legacy’, notably the threat from anti-state para-militaries, which, though reduced, is still very real. 

These ‘Problems of Legacy’ are de facto intractable. When the term is used, no speaker names or lists them. No definitions are rolled out. Chambers Dictionary says that a legacy can be money or property received from someone who has died. Or, more relevantly, legacy can be situations that developed as a result of past actions and decisions. Such problems are presented as beyond the realm of the human. It is as if they are ‘outside of time’. And yet they are as current as the weather.

With regard to policing and its recruitment difficulties, no one mentions that the PSNI is an organisation trammelled with failure. It failed to protect the private details of its staff at least twice in August 2003, publishing them on an external website and losing them in a laptop left in a car. leading to a threat to life, followed by a compensation bill that cannot be met within current budgets. Officers were put under investigation for sharing inappropriate images of incarcerated people. Officers are cited for misogyny. A disturbing case of a once-serving PSNI officer being investigated for multiple incidents of sexual crimes, including rape, has just been made public.

Radio reports of a recent inquest into the disappearance and death of a boy include details of officers not following up on calls, not keeping hand-written notes and not reacting readily enough to developments and threats.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are not historical. They are current.

Terming them thus allows them to be dodged. It allows senior officials and the political board of governance to raise their arms in the air in an appeal for understanding, while being ineffectual. Educated young women and men, regardless of social and political background, are understandably wary of committing to a hapless organisation that struggles to deliver on its basic aims. And that is currently a compromised bedfellow of the spooks. Vincent Kearney, Trevor McBirney and Barry McCaffrey are just three journalists enduring court processes for intrusions into their personal information. 

When flags of violent British/Unionist/Protestant proscribed organisations were hoisted on lamp-posts beside the police training college, the PSNI were unable to remove them, though a public outcry demanded it. They fluttered to flitters, leaving the organisation looking impotent. 

More flaggery accompanies the release of new public and private housing blocks, with the purpose of intimidating prospective buyers by crude sectarian territorial marking. Again the PSNI is inept, then engages in hand-wringing when families are bricked and petrol bombed. 

While individual officers performed well in dangerous circumstances, people facing racist attacks across towns and villages last summer were not served and protected as well as they should be. The burning of a replica boat of immigrants at a 12^th July event in Moygashel, without any police intervention amidst political bleating about legislation, would not encourage publicly-minded young women and men to join the service.

These are not ‘Problems of Legacy’. They are ‘Problems of Now’, in an organisation living by Brendan Behan’s observation that he knew of no situation that could not be made worse by the arrival of the police. 

These problems and others are easier to blog and comment about rather than to solve.

Long, over-running public inquiries? Check out Muckamore Hospital. The worst polluted lake in the land? Check out Lough Neagh. Connect that with the ‘cash for ash’ farrago. Or the singular over-production of chicken fillets and the mis-management of effluent by a legally immune water authority.

Many people are genuinely attempting to respond practically to these and other problems, at street level, by surmounting the barricade of ‘Problems of Legacy’ in order to act now. This is the single biggest challenge facing peace-building today. It challenges the peace-building desire for ‘moving on’, which cannot be achieved without attention to social and economic justice and the emotional impact of conflict and injustice. Now.

There is a role for artistic and imaginative work in this.

And now history and time have stopped, as if they were cogs in a great engine turning the century and I stuck my little finger in there. So they’re stopped. And I’m waiting.

Opportunities to create and implement programmes of works of non-violent social change in the direction of peace and justice can be taken. Public and philanthropic financial support for this work presents its own difficulties of co-option, distortion and power. How can state funds be used when the state is itself a continuing protagonist? And when terms like ‘change’, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ are contested and unsettling to people?

Perhaps they provide a place to start, when working with adults. Working with children is worthy, but the challenges are present now, not in the future and lying under ‘Problems of Legacy’ or yearning for the future take from actions necessary in the present world.

Word games, writing activities, action games, movement and spatial treatments are among a range of imaginative activities and programmes with adults that can help to build peace. 

Three words – change, peace, justice. Press PLAY.

Other arts practices can also be called upon also.

This helps to ensure the availability of non-violent tools for resolving our conflicts, and will be a significant part of the process of making our society more integrated and more just.

Good luck to us all.

Waiting… by Dave Duggan, Sole Purpose Productions, 2000

Published in Plays in a Peace Process, Guildhall Press, 2008

Arts Approaches to the Conflict in Northern Ireland by Dave Duggan

Published in Arts Approaches to Conflict, ed. Marian Liebmann, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London 1996

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

© Dave Duggan

WATCHING HAMNET

There are now three exceptional pieces of dramatic and literary art centring on the father-son relationships in the life and work of English dramatist William Shakepeare.

Historians of England anchor epochs in the country’s history to the names of monarchs. Shakespeare worked as an actor and dramatist in London, entertaining the court of Elizabeth 1. His most widely known tragedy, and perhaps the most famous play in English, is Hamlet (1602), a revenge drama notable for the high body count in the final scene, comparable to the ultra-kill last scene of L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997).

The play’s the thing that excites a novel and a film into existence.

A novel focusses on the earth-mother character of Agnes, who marries Shakespeare and with whom she has children, including a son called Hamnet (novel, Maggie O’ Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020). This boy is the character that O’Farrell uses to drive the plot towards a final sequence where the ‘play within the novel’ device is used to tantalise the reader with an earnest of opposition to death.

A film Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) takes the novel and creates a visual and aural wonder, on a semi-dark palette of autumn and forest colours, with intimate speech sounds, whisperings and murmurings, birthing roars and screeches, in forest and bedroom, and the whistling calls of falcons, as they hunt. 

The boy walks into darkness at the end. The mother laughs. 

Tragedy is defeated, in the only way it can be. By laughing, full-throated, in its heartless face.

Shakespeare worked in a time of torrid upheaval, in a country where adventurers and war-makers plundered great wealth and brought it to the Court and the city in London. Much like America today. Hollywood now, London then: that’s where money accumulated and circulated.

Shakespeare yearned to be among it.

Frustrated by his brutal father and his fruitful marriage, he did what many men have done since, right up to today: he protested the importance of his work and abandoned home for London, with the line, present in both the novel and the film, 

my company needs me.

These were occluded times. Agnes will not take her children to London, for fear of pestilence. But it finds her and the young ones. She says of Shakespeare that he has more in his head than any man she knows. Agnes is a sorcerer of herbs from garden and forest for conjuring medicines, with much in her head and in her heart. 

Riches flow from the contents of Shakespeare’s head, conjured into dramas that delight the Court and the public so much that he can buy a big house and land in Stratford, but cannot move back there. 

There is tragedy enough in this, but death, the ultimate tragedy, stalks them. It kills the boy at home and forces a formidable play from his father. Shakespeare writes and produces Hamlet, wherein the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, he told Agnes earlier, is overturned, when the boy does looks back to his mother, who smiles and lets him go.

In Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Chloe Zhao directs two physically strong and charismatic young Irish actors in exhilarating roles. They are present and convincing. Buckley has received both the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes awards. Oscar nominations are likely. Supporting actors are strong, especially Emily Watson, re-united with Mescal after their stirring work together in God’s Creatures.

A play within a play; a play within a novel; a play and a novel within a film.

A child within a womb; a child within a grave.

We may not cheat death, but we may salve life and its pains. By art.

Hamlet, play: recommended

Hamnet, novel: recommended.

Hamnet, film: recommended.

See also READING HAMNET (2022)

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/10/reading-hamnet-thats-n-not-l.html

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

END OF 2025 REPORTS ON HMOs FROM A NEIGHBOURLY ASSESSOR ARE IN

                            

A series of ‘end of year assessments’ on progress with HMOs in the neighbourhood of University of Ulster Magee campus (UU Magee) are now available. Summaries follow.

•⁠  ⁠Residents, as members of CRAM (Concerned Residents Around Magee) and individually, received a positive assessment for their diligence in responding to the glut of HMOs. Without their hard work, the drift to Holyland 2 in Derry would have accelerated even more in 2025. Further diligence is required in 2026 to avoid a relapse. ‘Keep up the good work’ is advised.

•⁠  ⁠Councillors and MLAS, notably those who were active on the Planning Committee and elsewhere, made a late surge in December that improved their assessment. This follows the successful delivery of the new Local Development Plan. Formal adoption of the 10% cap in the UU Magee neighbourhood must be an early target for 2026 in order to deliver on this late promise.

•⁠  ⁠Council officials and Planners are praised for effort, while remaining vulnerable to ruses such as CLEUD (Certificate of Lawful Existing Use or Development) and the regulations of PAC (Planning Appeals Commission). Two public meetings by planning officers were useful. Planners insistence on balance is welcomed, though balance remains some way off. All parties are not operating on a level playing field. Assisting councillors with their commitment to a 10% cap will strengthen future assessments.

•⁠  ⁠University of Ulster (UU) is marked ‘must do better’. Their current laissez-fair approach to accommodating students negates their duty of care to them and to their neighbours. Reliance on the Task Force’s Report re: the private sector left UU short, though recent moves at the Desmond’s Strand Road site gives its assessment a late boost. Securing money for a Sports’ facility and teaching facilities highlights the neglect of living accommodation. UU’s neglect of the parking congestion caused by staff and students remains a problem. ‘Must do better’ is the overall assessement.

•⁠  ⁠A number of developers, landlords and their agents failed, not helped by absenteeism and the blatant disregard of local needs by advertising the use of CLEUD (a form of ‘get out of jail free’ card). Planning Purpose Built Student Accommodations (PBSA) without considering car-parking further exacerbates congestion. They need a total re-orientation in the direction of balance, as noted by Planners above, to achieve a better assessment. A re-sit may be on the cards.

•⁠  ⁠Department for Infrastructure (DfI) responded to MLAs and residents’ concerns, but the congestion caused by University expansion led to a lower assessment. Traffic wardens are welcome, though their presence is intermittent, leading to a sense of ‘an accident waiting to happen’. Pressure on services such as fire and rescue, ambulance, buses and refuse collection leaves the end of year assessment for DfI as ‘less than satisfactory’.

A mixed bag in general, with hope for optimism resting with Councillors commitment to a 10% cap on HMOs in the UU Magee neighbourhood, coupled with a focus on balance by Planners and some recent evidence that Purpose Built Student Accommodation may be on the horizon.

© Dave Duggan 2025

The Neighbourly Assessor is Dave Duggan, a writer who lives around the corner from UU Magee.

WATCHING TRAD AT FOYLE FILM FESTIVAL

The 38th Foyle Film Festival (FFF) opened on Wednesday 19^th November with a screening of Lance Daly’s latest film TRAD.

A full house engages in a very warm, frank and informative q&a with writer/producer/director Daly and two cast members. They share insights into their experiences which go much wider than just one film. They illuminate the work, the sacrifices and pleasures, the decisions, set backs, joys and woes of film-making. 

It makes for a splendid film festival evening, the epitome of what such an event could be, ably handled by festival director Christopher Morrison. The FFF welcomes Daly back from a previous occasion when he screened one of his first films, early in the festival’s 38 year history. 

His previous film to TRAD is Black 47, made in 2018, drawing a deserter from British imperial wars in Afghanistan back to his famine-ravaged home in Connemara, where he enacts vengeance, on behalf of his stricken family, on the local soldiery and landlords.

TRAD is a very different film, though set once more in the west of Ireland, within an Irish-speaking family, where the mother is a driven music and dance teacher and the father is an easy-going musician. It is a coming-of-age film for the young woman, Shona McAnally (Megan Nic Fhionnaghaile), who is bursting to get away from the round of féilte, fleadhanna, lessons and rehearsals under her mother’s oppressive drive. Her younger brother Mickey (Dallán Woods) tags along when Shona hooks up with a van-load of summer bohemians, playing music, camping on beaches and ‘having the laugh’, until  Shona ‘shifts’ the handsome banjo player in his tent. 

Mickey calls his Mammy on his hidden phone. Micky goes home. 

Shona walks away from the van and is joined by a shy young guitarist, Ray (Cathal Coade Parker), who has been aching to talk to her. They walk, hitch, busk and camp. He has a decent tent, being a college student from a family with a few bob. They busk south through Mayo and into Galway, as friends and fellows. They reach Galway city and the tension within and between them erupts at Spanish Arch, in a scene beside the Claddagh, where they pitch for the last time. 

Shona destroys her fiddle, in a rage of frustration.

The resolution follows with Shona re-joining her family as a grown-up young woman, though she still wears the hapless green dress her mother gives her for performing at the Fléadh in Mullingar. All elements of the summer journeying are united in a fantastic pub session, with multiple instruments of the Irish tradition and some fine sean-nós dancing. That scene, actually shot in the Four Provinces Pub in Dublin, is a triumph of film-making and editing, fair play to Lance Daly and his colleagues.

The acting is terrific, the scenery is marvellous, the story is thin, but works and the music throughout is tremendous. The editing and direction are superb. Still, I left the cinema unsettled. I cannot recommend the film. 

I was unsettled by the character Harky (Aiden Gillen). He was the clearest manifestation of coercive control I’ve seen on screen for a while. He is older than the others. He owns and drives the van. Having offered a lift home to Shona and Mickey, he drives past their house, then asks Shona to stay on. He doesn’t force her, but he doesn’t make it easy for her to get off. Mickey follows along, until he feels abandoned. The crack goes out of it.

Harky takes all their phones. He controls communication with the outside world. He controls the money, producing a wad of cash when someone says they need food. This moment provides a great slice of dialogue:

- Did you rob a bank?

- No, the banks rob us.

Harky takes them to his base, an isolated ruin, with a large pond in the middle. It is just the spot for someone half-cut to fall into. Someone like Mickey, gargling bottles of booze. Harky regales them all with lists of random words and riddles, never answering a question, passing this off as wisdom, when it has all the characteristics of the worst of cultism: hem the acolytes in, set yourself up as the wise-beyond-comprehension guru, control all aspects of their lives.

Mickey and Shona are lucky to get away from him.

This soured the film for me. I should have asked Lance Daly the question:

Why did you choose an instance of coercive control to launch the young people’s road-trip?

TRAD – recommended? See Black 47 instead.

TRAD; film; Lance Daly; Monto Movies; Ireland, 2025

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WATCHING STILLWATER

Director Thomas McCarthy made the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight (2016). It recounts The Boston Globe’s unravelling of cover-ups of sexual abuse crimes by Roman Catholic clerics and the collusion of Boston law firms. 

His 2021 film Stillwater is available on Channel 4’s catch up service, All 4. While not as strong as Spotlight, it is nonetheless a very insightful treatment of a family tragedy, using a crime thriller story-line to deliver a watchable and moving romance-drama. 

Stillwater presents a telling allegory of the USA today.

These films incline the viewer to keep an eye out for other work by McCarthy.

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is an American roughneck, built for hard labour on oil rigs and construction sites. He is as taciturn as a mule, but behind the quiet is a fevered anger, stoked by poverty, loss, alcoholism and injustice. He is polite and mannerly. His “Thank you Maam’s” echo throughout the film. He prays with fervour at each meal. His anger - some might term it passion were he middle-class - drives a quest. He lives to prove his daughter’s, Allison Baker (Abigail Breslin), innocence for a crime he is convinced she didn’t commit.     

After a short prologue in Oklahoma, on an oil-field and in his mother-in-law’s house, the film lifts off with Bill when he travels to Marseilles, where his daughter is incarcerated for killing her lover. He has travelled to the French Mediterranean port many times. This trip is different, because he meets Maya, aged 8 (Lilou Siauvard), and her mother Virginie (Camille Cottin).

An uneasy, then warm, relationship grows between the adults, cultivated by Maya’s charm and Bill’s love for the child. There is a running joke at meal-time, when Bill offers hand-holding prayer and invites Maya to conclude with “Dig in”, an echo of his roughneck life. He delivers a great speech about digging and holes through dinner prepartion.

The adults grow closer. In one post-coital, morning-after scene, without dialogue, a gorgeous image of domestic comfort centres on Maya, with colouring pens and paper, grinning knowingly at the adults seated on the nearby sofa. 

Bill has new information. He is determined to track down a local man he is sure will clear his daughter’s name. The search takes him to La Rouvière, Marseille’s city within a city, near the Stade Vélodrome — home to the local football team Olympique de Marseille (OM). Using the stadium as the launch pad for the final scenes fleshes out just how out of his depth, culturally, linguistically and politically Bill is amidst the divisions that characterise Marseilles.

Bill encounters these divisions and the survival techniques people use, when he works for a dodgy builder and makes a solo run into La Rouvière, where he very quickly gets into trouble.

Bill is America, on an individual scale. He just wants to do good. Why can’t people see that? Why won’t people comply? But people have had enough of outsider arrivistes, their demands and their solutions, generally relying on the force of arms or money, as if they were the only people with problems. A friend of Virginie asks Bill if he voted for Trump, expecting him to say ‘yes’. It’s the question and expected answer in the viewer’s mind throughout. 

Alison, Bill’s daughter, is also America, on her own different, individual scale. She just wants to get as far away as possible. Why can’t people let her do what she wants? Why do people bother her? Why won’t people just go away, when she’s had enough of them? But people will take her money to do her bidding, even at great cost to themselves.

Scenes near the end of the film resonate with allegory. 

- A vacuous home-coming for Alison, led by MAGA-yearning politicians and Oklahoma locals, festers cringe. It reminds the viewer of the heart-break of families and the callousness of politicians, as seen in detainee returns in Israel and Palestine recently. 

- Alison sits smoking with Virginie, while on day-release parole. She reveals how broken she feels, without acknowledging that her actions are the driver for the tragedies that grip the people around her.

- Later, she sits on the stoop with her father, in a classic image of America at home. She says the world still looks the same. Bill says it has changed. It will never be the same to him again. The deep malaise in Allison, which she takes to herself, is an allegory for contemporary US society. Bill sees his home place with new eyes, following his experiences out of the country. His trials overseas have given him new insights. Allison sees only herself and her deserving.

Marseilles is Marseilles, in all its beauty and depravity, its vivacity and division. 

Jean-Claude Izzo, a French poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist wrote three neo-noir  crime novels set in Marseilles in the 1990s, worth reading for a view of the city’s divisions and the lives people build there: Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea.

Stillwater naturally echoes The French Connection, though Bill is not Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle. He is tough enough, but less vicious. His sensibilities are awakened by Maya and Virginie, but his legacy-quest to aid his daughter impels him into violence and tragedy.

Stillwater? Highly recommended.

Stillwater; film; Thomas McCarthy; Participant Media LLC, 2021

French Connection; film; William Friedkin; Philip D’Antoni Productions; 1971

Jean Claude Izzo; writer; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude Izzo

An article on Marseilles: https://themarkaz.org/cities-within-the-city/

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter