‘She was a person who assumed everything was going to continue’. Review: Blue Road, The Edna O’Brien Story
By Margot Paisner
I’m standing with a friend at the bus stop having seen the last official screening of Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story. We are both quiet, sharing the type of silence only possible after a religious experience. The film, despite only having a running time of one hour and thirty-nine minutes is packed with detail. Love or hate Ms O’Brien — which the writer Ann Enright quite aptly says is the only response — it’s impossible not to be fascinated by her. The innumerable scandals, her reflections and philosophies, the intricacies of her life. O’Brien is mesmerising. Up until her very last moments, which O’Shea captures on film, she speaks with a natural prose that feels on the verge of extinction in a world so obsessed with shortcuts and the instant gratification of easily digestible soundbites.
Sinéad O’Shea, the documentary’s director, grew up in Navan, Co. Meath. Perhaps her upbringing as a girl in nineties, small town rural Ireland gives her the best vantage for directing this film. So much of O’Brien’s writing, and the controversy that surrounded it, stems from similar experiences. There are a lot of shared sentiments; shame as a controlling force over women, the merging of religion and constitution in Ireland’s politics, and the web of pitchforks that comes with being a mother, lover, wife, and writer.
It is O’Brien’s observations at the end of the film — on loneliness and being an outcast — that have exquisite strengths, yet fatal hindrances that we see played out in O’Brian’s literary life versus her personal life. The film uses cinematography, mixed archived footage, and Edna’s natural prose tongue, to depict a desperate desire for freedom from the shackles of small-town gossip, boredom, and religious constraint. Edna was, as she puts it, ‘starving for life’, her imagination serving as a bigger window to life than anything tangible at home. The film’s snippets of electrically colourful Dublin and London in the sixties, compared with the picturesque, yet desolate black-and-white roads of Tuamgraney, make it impossible not to empathise.
Strikingly to me, O’Brien never paints herself as a genius feminist icon. In interviews she makes sure to come across as sweet and docile, a small twinkle in her eyes. O’Brien aptly uses interviews to question why all woman were not allowed to express themselves, highlighting how women’s creative and intellectual freedoms were obstructed by men. Of course, the success of the film overrides this dominance, with it being premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2024 before going on to win Best New Irish Feature at the Cork International Film festival. While it is bittersweet that O’Brien never got to see the final cut of the film, I can imagine her smiling down with glee at an almost entirely female production team.
Edna previously shared how her one wish was that she had more laughter in her life, that she and the people around her shared laughter more. While O’Brien’s life was tainted with pain, the film sheds light on how much jollity there really was. Even in her late nineties, Edna was still able to make a whole audience roar with laughter, exactly how she did throughout her life on chat shows and interviews.
O’Brien’s life ends without a partner, she is divorced and suffered great heartbreak, she explains how the hiatus in her writing career, can, in ways be attributed to this. The film places great emphasis in lines of questioning to her sons, and to her, if things would’ve turned out differently if she could’ve just settled down with a nice man. I wonder if Edna would’ve been the same, if her writing would have been the same, if she would’ve even gone on to teach, had she settled down? I wondered why the film put so much emphasis on O’Brien potentially being better off if she did. Her story is equally tragic as it is victorious. Her story is hers and I don’t wonder about alternate realities where she is happily married. She is phenomenal in all her human splendour and her real-life story is testament to that.
The film serves as a final hurrah, ‘A final say’ as O’Shea says. Edna’s funeral was private and perfect — the only thing she wanted towards the end of her life was her own quiet place, in Ireland. She became part of what she believed to be the only place she was ever truly free. The documentary, more than anything, made me want to write and write and write. ‘Write what is true’, Edna says, ‘and someone will read it’. The honesty Edna strode for in her prose should inspire everyone. Walter Mosely, whom Edna taught, tells O’Shea about how he can hardly put into words the impact O’Brien had on him as a writer and a person. He comes across truly indebted to her, and I think we all are in some way. Everyone in the cinema certainly felt so.
When I talk to someone about Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, I tell them you must watch it — and then watch it again.
