whom that’s plainly untrue; here and in his cannily-framed contrasts of the city’s Christmas shopping streets with the rundown suburbs, Black gives a grim glimpse at a social scales with balance decidedly tipped.
That character is Jimmy, the laconic dole-drawing squatter whose entry to the rundown Georgian townhouse that hosts the movie’s microcosm with a muttered “home sweet home” introduces the dry humour with which so much of the film’s bleakness is tempered. As played by Jimmy Brennan, who drew on his own experience in penning the script, he’s a fascinating lead, navigating this cast of abandoned eccentrics with the dour scowl on his face as much a constant as the towel wrapped round his waist. In his acting as much as his writing, Brennan relishes wry reprieve from the visual and tonal darkness of the piece; his curt commentary on the stray souls who share this makeshift abode offers welcome relief from the apocalyptic absurdity of their circumstance. As much as these characters may reside amidst the rubble, some of them are looking at the stairs.
But where the reasons for those others’ exclusion from this closed society are clearly and damningly signalled, whether born of physical or mental illness or the colour of their skin, it’s not until the aforesaid third-reel revelation of a sexual otherness that we come to understand Jimmy’s residence on the rim. In so structuring their drama, Brennan and Black retrospectively render the character’s quiet interiority an expression of queer (self-)repression. So long hidden from himself as much as from us, Jimmy’s inclinations are without outlet in an Ireland that criminalises such sexual transgression; by withholding the reveal for so much of its length, Pigs unearths the deep traumas of a shamed existence and lends tragic undertones to Jimmy’s exclusion even from the fringe figures that fill the small-scale society of this home. Even here, in the midst of the marginalised, one inalienable truth holds fast: this is no country for queer men.
If that ineluctable ritual of gay courtship in the pre-decriminalisation era will have been appreciable, if alien, to even straight audiences, it’s likely only those of a shared persuasion who’ll have observed the ensuing scene with stomachs sinking. As Jimmy and his suitor stroll forth from the shadows, that intangible sense of excitement in the air is soon punctuated by the pursuit of four youths who follow the pair with puckering noises and intimidating oohs. Contemporary queer viewers can’t not have thought of Declan Flynn, whose brutal murder at the hands of a similarly-sized gang in Fairview Park had earned only suspended sentences scarcely a year prior. It is, for this, a striking sequence, expressed all in one shot: first ripe with the potential of passion, then saddled with the terror of threat, at last so sad as the wearied parting makes clear the entrenched attitudes of this culture render the fulfillment of these men fundamentally unachievable.
So it is with all the dispossessed desires in the Dublin Black depicts. Pigs excels in its exposure of the casual cruelty at the heart of Irish society, and its self-perpetuating entrenchment in the apparatus of state. As detectives later visit Jimmy in his squat, not to investigate a violent home beating but to question his welfare claim, their decrying of these denizens pithily points to the title’s double entendre. Reports abounding around the time of the film’s making of Gardaí outing gay men in the course of the investigation of the murder of Charles Self will have made this scene uncomfortably authentic for many. “I’ll be there in court to tell the judge what you’ve done,” they threaten, “What you are.” But the identity with which Pigs is interested, even obsessed, is less Jimmy’s than Ireland’s. As he’s driven away in the back of a car, the camera capturing the streets slipping by in the window’s reflection as his face stares out over them, the double exposure effect’s implications are clear. This dystopian Dublin is no nightmare vision of the future, but the lived-in present, clear as day.
CinÉireann / June 2018 21