Scheduled for release later this month Circle of Friends the movie from the hugely popular novel of the same name by Maeve Binchy is reviewed by Colin Lacey.
Near the beginning of Circle of Friends, college heartthrob Jack marvels at the forthright personality and self-awareness of fellow University College Dublin student Benny, the gauche young country girl whose life he will change forever. “You really know who you are, don’t you?” he asks, implying that despite the bravado he maintains, such self-possession eludes him. “Well, of course I do,” Benny answers emphatically, and peers from beneath a curtain of curls with a look that says this is the most unnecessary question she’s ever heard. Unused to such aplomb — from a girl, especially — Jack begins to admire Benny, and begins to understand that theirs would be no ordinary conquer-and-discard affair.
It’s a delicate, gently affecting moment that perfectly captures Benny’s sweetly confident nature, and also suggests much of the unpretentious charm of the film itself. Based on the popular novel by bestselling Irish author Maeve Binchy, Circle of Friends is a delightful coming-of-age drama that delivers an honest, unsentimentalized, and thoroughly entertaining look at the amorous misadventures of three childhood friends in 1950s Ireland. Essentially a story of first love and first betrayal, Circle of Friends opens in 1957, as Benny and Eve swap the confines of small-town rural Ireland for the cosmopolitan bustle of UCD. There they rejoin Nan, a school friend from home whose family had moved to Dublin years before. More worldly than her country-raised friends, Nan introduces Benny and Eve to Jack Foley and his circle of rugby-playing students, while she chases the affections of Simon, scion of a bankrupt Ascendancy family.
Benny is immediately attracted to medical student Jack, although initially he seems more interested in her two friends. But eventually the two begin a passionate romance, and when both Eve and Nan find their own partners, it looks like the three friends have found the sort of happiness they believe will last.
But the affairs are played out against a repressive cultural climate that condemns pre-marital sexual relationships as a mortal sin, and although Benny and Eve, testing the limits of their new-found freedoms, are tempted to give in to their boyfriends’ requests for sex, they both decide to err on the side of chastity. Only Nan, in a misguided attempt to retain the rakish Simon’s affections, actually succumbs to temptation, and the consequences of her seduction become the axis on which the plot turns.
The discovery that she is pregnant is followed by the discovery that her relationship with Simon was a matter of convenience, not of love. In a finely-observed scene that neatly spotlights both the crushing pressure of a society with a culturally-enforced moralism and also the divisions between landed Protestant and working-class Catholic, Simon weasels out of Nan’s demands for marriage, and, desperate to avoid the shame of remaining single and pregnant, Nan resorts to betraying her two closest friends in an effort to maintain her honor. In the complications that ensue, the deepening romance between Benny and Jack is destroyed.
And although Nan’s dilemma is the main catalyst for the film’s action, Circle of Friends actually concentrates on the relationship between Benny and Jack. The film sticks closely to the basic romantic structure of Binchy’s novel, and the girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl-wins-boy inevitability, while remaining on the right side of formulaic, offers no real surprises.
But director Pat O’Connor (Cal, The Ballroom of Romance) has assembled an exemplary cast of newcomers and reliable Irish character actors, and coupled with a picture-perfect reproduction of an Ireland long disappeared and some stunning photography — the countryside around Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny, which doubles as Dublin in the 1950s, has never looked so sparkling — Circle of Friends easily transcends the standard-issue storyline to become a hugely entertaining, unashamedly romantic treat.
Led by the charismatic Minnie Driver as Benny in an honest, winning performance that should mark the beginning of a long career, the whole cast plays with the natural ease of real-life friends, and instills the film with an authenticity and energy missing from many a more star-laden vehicle. Saffron Burrows’s Nan wavers deftly between haughty and hurt, and creates a poignant picture of a precocious social climber striving to outstrip her humble beginnings at any cost, and Chris O’Donnell (despite an occasionally wobbly Irish accent) displays just the right amount of vulnerability and strength as Jack. Also memorable is Alan Cumming as Sean, Benny’s indefatigable suitor and eventual stalker, surely one of the most hilariously sleazy on-screen characters to appear in an Irish film for ages (and undoubtedly the worst advertisement ever for the benefits of double-entry book-keeping!).
With any period film, the whole enterprise can collapse under the weight of inauthentic detail. But with Circle of Friends, the producers have been careful to recreate not only the look of the period from hemlines to hats to hotels, but also something of the mood evoked by the clash between youthful optimism and religious suppression of physical pleasure. As result of this attention to detail, as a period work, Circle of Friends is on a par with anything by English masters Merchant and Ivory.
Thematically similar to its U.S. counterpart, American Graffiti, but with soupedup Chevrolets replaced by Dublin buses, Elvis replaced by showbands, and sexual permissiveness replaced by fear of eternal damnation, Circle of Friends is a wonderful evocation of a time when to err may have been human, but to err and be caught was a tragic mistake.♦
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March/April 1995 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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