Change — be it purposeful self-reinvention, the ineluctable alterations brought about by the passage of time, or even the metamorphosis of man into rodent — is one consistent theme unifying the Third Annual Boston Irish Film Festival. That’s not surprising given that these movies come from a new Ireland, one that has changed radically, permanently, and fundamentally over its history, but never more than over the past few decades.

Pat Murphy’s Nora (1999; Sunday at 9 p.m., with director Pat Murphy and producer James Flynn present) depicts the transformations undergone by one of Ireland’s best-known self-reinventors and his life-long love, limning the early years of the relationship James Joyce (Ewan McGregor) and Nora Barnacle (Susan Lynch), from their meeting in June of 1904 to the publication of Dubliners in 1914. Joyce’s decision to change his life by leaving an island whose population was “paralyzed by fear, frightened of themselves, frightened of the Church” and relocating to a more liberated Continent is legendary. Much less is known about Nora, the uneducated Galway lass whom Joyce made his life partner. What emerges from this film is a portrait of a woman whose relationship with this mercurial genius changed her immensely.

Nora hardly read her husband’s work, and she responded to his florid, poetic love letters with text copied from magazines (their letters are central to the narrative here). In many ways, she was his ideal partner. Joyce realized this, even though the uneducated chambermaid seemed an obvious mismatch. “Say one thing for the bard,” says Joyce’s boorish gadabout friend Oliver St. John Gogarty, “He’s not a snob, is he?” Joyce himself plays along: “She can’t spell or punctuate or even use a capital letter, but she can produce children.” After the couple have moved to Trieste, Nora is told by Joyce’s brother that her role in the marriage should be to ease the obstacles on Joyce’s road to genius.

For all this imbalance in the relationship, their love was passionate, as the film reveals. And Lynch embodies Nora’s earthy sexuality. From dingy Dublin streets to sunny Italian palazzos, this Nora is a woman initially unsure, plucked from her home town, forever in a man’s shadow. Through her displacement, she develops a self-possessed confidence. Joyce’s transformation from a whore-frequenting Dublin drunk to the pre-eminent writer of the 20th century (still drunk) through self-imposed exile has been amply celebrated, but the metamorphosis of his wife from repressed Connaught bumpkin to a finely dressed Italian-speaking denizen of Paris, Zurich, and Trieste was, in its way, more significant.

Donald Taylor Black’s Dear Boy: The Story of Micheál MacLiammóir (2000; screens Sunday at 3 p.m.) is an engrossing documentary about another master of self-invention. MacLiammóir was co-founder of Dublin’s legendary Gate Theatre, and a crucial player in that city’s early-20th-century artistic renaissance.

A 1960s Irish-language documentary is excerpted early in the film. “Actor . . . Designer . . . Writer . . . Artist . . . Irishman . . . European,” the subtitles read. “But who was he?” Good question. MacLiammóir was indeed a complex character, living his life “flamboyantly Irish . . . openly gay.” Despite the latter, he was one of Dublin’s best-loved figures, which speaks volumes about his magnetism and charisma because, as one commentator describes the Ireland of the early part of the last century (in a considerable understatement), “it was a difficult country to be gay in.”

The more intriguing aspect of MacLiammóir’s persona, though, was his protean take on nationality. This man who embraced his Irish culture with such gusto was in fact born Alfred Willmore in northwest London. Introduced by a London-Irish friend to Yeats and the Gaelic League, he visited Ireland at 16 and was immediately smitten with its culture, its language, its sad history. He rendered his name in Irish and from that point on claimed to everyone to have been born in Ireland. It was not until the very end of his life that a few people learned the truth. Many of those friends and enthusiasts interviewed theorize that this “icon of artifice” took such relish in the roles he filled on stage, and enacted such a self-transformation in his own life because of his sexuality, that “to be himself he had to create this identity.”

May the Road Rise Up (2000; Saturday at 5 p.m., with Alen MacWeeney present) is a stark, affecting study of Ireland’s itinerant Traveler community from Alen MacWeeney and John T. Davis. MacWeeney roamed the island in the mid 1960s documenting this people — a persecuted minority with their own distinct history, culture, and language who were literally spat upon by the settled community. The images he produced during that time are austere studies of grimy, timeworn faces, gnarled hands, and penetrating gazes. Soon after, MacWeeney relocated to the US (where he served, for a time, as apprentice to Richard Avedon). May the Road Rise Up chronicles his 1999 return.

He revisits many of the same people; many others are no longer living. He finds that the changes undergone by Ireland’s itinerant community in the last 35 years are hard to quantify. On the one hand, these people have gained a modicum of acceptance — during his second visit one of MacWeeney’s original subjects was even picked to be a contestant on a game show. But in other ways they’re faring much worse. “The most disturbing change since the time I took the photographs is that violence seems to be a part of every Traveler’s life now,” he says. “Disputes [between rival Traveler families] are on a scale of life and death.” In addition, many of the towns around which they camp will not allow ponies and horses, which are crucial to their livelihood. (“Horses are our pride and joy. We’ll live and die by them.”) Their language, Shelta, is threatened, and many are assimilating. To some it appears that we are witnessing the end of the Travelers’ way of life. If that end does come about, MacWeeney’s photographs and this quietly dignified film will help preserve it. “In time, they stopped being photographs,” says the director of his work, “and became the people in them.”

Beyond the Pale (2000; Saturday at 9:30 p.m., with director George Bazala and members of the cast present) is a middling semi-autobiographical account of a young suburban Dubliner’s venture to New York City. It’s a story about innocence and experience, the longing for escape and the initial euphoria of arrival, and disappointment sewn up with a perfunctory happy ending.

Patrick (writer and co-producer Patrick Clarke) arrives in Brooklyn with a friend, the ne’er-do-well loudmouth Seamus, and stays with a kindly but niggling Irish-American housemother. Innocent, he learns the hard way about life in the rough-and-tumble US: how difficult it is to find a good job as an illegal immigrant, how friends can double-cross you, how good girls often go out with assholes whose machinations end up getting you deported. He also finds that love blooms in the strangest places. The film’s most recognizable face belongs to Malachy McCourt, brother of Frank; he plays Tom Finnegan, a character who, as Brendan Behan once quipped, is a drinker with a writing problem. Patrick is able to help Tom get back on the right track, and Tom returns the favor.

Much as he does in his blarney-soaked memoir A Monk Swimming, ol’ Malachy lays the oirish on a bit thick. Still, he’s Alec Guinness compared to some of the other cast members. It’s hard to find fault with an amateur production that wears its heart on its sleeve. And George Bazala is a confident director. But the script, riddled with aphorisms, moralisms, and truisms, is often delivered in a cringe-inducing wooden monotone style.

Steve Barron’s Rat (2000; Friday at 7 p.m.), on the other hand, is a raucous affair. It’s superbly funny, with comedy of a particularly Dublin bent. It too deals with a transformation, transposing Kafka’s Metamorphosis from Prague to a Dublin suburb. Hubert Flynn (Pete Postlethwaite) — a hapless bread deliveryman with a shrewish wife, Conchita, a priesthood-bound son, Pius, and a loving daughter, Marietta — finds life in Kimmage humdrum. One day he comes home from the pub feeling not quite right. The next morning, there sitting on his flattened clothes is a white lab rat.

Almost immediately after the news of this bizarre occurrence gets out, an unctuous journalist arrives at the Flynns’ doorstep, offering to ghostwrite a book. Er, make a film. Well, which one? “Em . . . a buke, and then the fillum of the buke, and then the buke of the fillum,” he says. And in order to get at the true meat of the story, of course, he’ll have to move in with the family and witness their interaction with their newest member.

What follows is an absurdist black comic romp as Hubert’s family deal with the situation as best they can. Conchita is furious at Hubert’s lack of consideration and screams at the rodent to eat his egg (“A man can’t live on black pudding!”). Sagacious Uncle Matt dryly advises that “he’ll have to quit his job. No one wants their bread delivered by a rat.” Hubert is taken down to the pub, where he drinks his pint with gusto. “Ah, he was fond of his pint,” says the publican as he watches. “Mind you, he was never heavy into it. Seven or eight an evening would do it.”

Things get worse when, influenced by the reporter’s dark machinations, the family members begin to turn against Hubert. Pius actually wants to kill him — having a father who’s a rat is quite an obstacle to becoming a priest, you see. Besides, “animals were created to serve man. It’s in the Bible. Page one.” Eventually it’s decided to set Hubert free in a maggot factory (that such a thing exists may seem improbable, but remember that Kimmage also has a retailer called Riley’s Rat Shop). Should he happen to return to human form, he can just take the bus home. (His family have the foresight to leave him a suit under a rock with bus fare in the front pocket.)

Rat is already a hit in Ireland, and by rights it should be one here (it opens in general release next Friday). Emblematic of a rejuvenated Irish film industry, it’s the kind of silly but canny movie that American studios should be making.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001