Baltimore review: Bad title, great film about self-radicalised English IRA art thief
The mundane but farcical realities of terror mixes with the importance and power of art in Baltimore, the latest film from husband and wife director duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, which screened in Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival.
The directors, sometimes referred to together under their creative partnership title of ‘Desperate Optimists’, have always been frank confronting their Irish identity, both in narrative features and in their two recent documentaries, Further Beyond and The Future Tense (both worth checking out).
In their new feature film Baltimore they explore the life of Rose Dugdale, a young woman who was born into the English aristocracy before self-radicalising and supporting the IRA via a number of plots.
Molloy and Lawlor concentrate on her most (in)famous, where Dugdale, who is played in Baltimore by Imogen Poots, raids an Irish country home and steals several priceless paintings (among them the Vermeer work Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid).
The plan for Dugdale and her accomplices is to hold the masterpieces hostage in exchange for the repatriation of several IRA fighters who are in London prisons.
As explained by Lawlor in a Q&A after the screening, the film was designed as a triptych. You have one strand seeing how Dugdale went from reluctant debutante at Buckingham Palace to IRA ally, another showing the rather bumbling raid itself and the third, where they attempt to ransom the paintings and hide out.
Imogen Poots is having great fun throughout the 90 minute run time, which zips by. Her career has not reached the heights once expected but she is on top form in Baltimore, especially revelling in her character’s more-than-dodgy French accent, used to hide her identity.
She is given plenty of room by Lawlor and Molloy to really shine, reckoning with her own actions and threats.
The directing duo are incredibly self-aware filmmakers and in Baltimore they are brave enough to allow Poots several rather knowing winks at the camera.
That’s part of the fun. Despite some sporadic violence and genuine threat, it does not take itself too seriously, it is more consumed by the ideas Dugdale’s brazen robbery presents: identity, violence as a means to an end and the importance of art.
After the theft Dugdale soon becomes attached to the works, discussing their themes and powers with her accomplices, who are played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Lewis Brophy. The former the wise old hand, the latter an excitable young upstart with aspirations for IRA glory.
Dugdale is desperate not to destroy them and despite her passion for the cause, she’s also desperate not to harm anyone. Nonetheless a nearby farmer with poor eyesight soon finds himself at risk in a perilous showdown.
Dugdale, who is still alive today, had no input into the film which is more of an exploration of what might have been than a dramatic, factual retelling.
And it’s easy to see why the director duo were drawn to the story and the three strands play off each other almost perfectly, managing tone and humour.
It’s a shame they settled on the title of Baltimore, which is the location of the gang’s safehouse on the south coast of Ireland (but is never seen during the film). Dugdale as an alternative title might give the impression the film is about her, when in reality it is about so much more.
One recurring motif of fox killing is a bit overdone but such choices are easy to forgive with a film that gives you so many questions and entertains you quite like this.
