Movie of the week: Shadow Dancer

Something in Shadow Dancer, a gloomy conspiracy thriller set in 1990s Belfast, reminded me of an exchange between Ivor Claire and Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. Ivor asks Guy what he would do if challenged to a duel. Guy replies: “Laugh.” Ivor, by contrast, responds thoughtfully: “One hundred and fifty years ago, we would have to fight if challenged. Now we’d laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question.”

In the 1970s, an IRA man knew it was his duty to attack the British with every violent means, but in 2012, with Martin McGuinness shaking hands with the queen, the idea is laughable. In 1993, the era of the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement, republican foot soldiers found themselves confronted with Ivor Claire’s “awkward question”.

This is the backdrop to Shadow Dancer, directed by James Marsh, known for his documentaries Man on Wire and Project Nim. ITN political journalist Tom Bradby has written the screenplay, adapted from his own novel of the same title.

Andrea Riseborough plays Colette McVeigh, a young Belfast woman who we see first riding the London Underground. Marsh creates a mood of disquiet and tension with long, unbroken scenes and closeups on her pale, expressionless face. Colette is fingering a bag, and Marsh allows the audience to wonder whether she is about to plant a bomb, or whether  this is a dummy run, or something else entirely. Her underground expedition ends dramatically, unexpectedly, and a British intelligence officer called Mac, played by Clive Owen, arrives on the scene. Mac and Colette make a dangerous secret deal, which lays the foundation for the drama that is to follow.

The film makes clear from the outset that Colette is from a staunch and, in fact, rather famous republican family in West Belfast, but for reasons suggested in the tense and grim opening sequence, her dedication to the cause and her readiness for active service are coloured with guilt, doubt and self-hate. Back in Belfast, she has a  small son to look after, though babysitting duties are taken by her mother, the renowned local matriarch Ma (Brid Brennan). Colette has two brothers, Gerry and Connor — very good performances from Aiden Gillen and Domnhall Gleeson — who are active IRA terrorists.

Connor is fiercely protective of his sister, though Gerry is more distant, more coldly ideological and quietly angry at his superiors’ readiness to negotiate secretly with the Brits. This negotiation, with its attendant crisis of confidence, is a kind of parallel or conceptual rhyme with the understanding between Mac and Colette.

Now Colette has to explain the aftermath of her London mission to the hard-faced chief Kevin (David Wilmot), a man given to playing mind games with the activists he pulls in for questioning. In Belfast, the republican commanders become deeply suspicious of Colette’s behaviour, while in London it is Mac’s turn to become suspicious. His own superior, Kate Fletcher (Gillian Anderson), appears to be strangely detached about Mac’s coup in catching a mole. Is something else going on?

Convincing moments
Marsh’s movie is calm, level, downbeat. The tension is subtle — perhaps subtler than it really should be. Its dramatic style reminded me of Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father (made in that crucial year of 1993), though one exchange between Mac and Colette, filmed with the pair facing in profile, may possibly have been inspired by the very much more extended dialogue scene between the priest and Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). It certainly treats the republicans much more reverently than, say, John Michael McDonagh’s 2011 movie The Guard, which takes a more subversive, black-comic view.

Together, Marsh and Bradby carry it off successfully, particularly in a good IRA funeral scene, a military-style salute defiantly carried out under the noses of the British soldiers. There are, however, also some less convincing moments. For some reason, Colette wears a vivid red, shiny-looking coat, which makes her look more like a strippergram than an undercover agent. Surely she should be wearing something less conspicuous? And the last act and the final reveal, in which the murky conspiracy is brought to light, doesn’t deliver quite the hard narrative punch I was hoping for.

Riseborough’s performance is certainly very good, though, and another demonstration of her technique, intelligence and versatility: she is so good at suggesting thoughts and emotions that surface slowly and gradually. And the movie is very good at showing the sheer misery of the time. In one republican pub, a tense notice says: “Singing not allowed.” Nothing shows the mood of national depression and fear more clearly than that. — © Guardian News & Media 2013