Four Letters of Love
Polly Steele’s heartfelt adaptation of Niall Williams’ bestseller is a pretty thing, if not an entirely credible one.
For art’s sake, by God: Pierce Brosnan
Photo courtesy of Vertigo Releasing.
There’s more than a touch of blarney about Polly Steele’s adaptation of Niall Williams’ 1977 bestseller. To be sure, to be sure, it’s hard to come across a period Irish film without a good dose of viola, violin and harmonica, along with vistas of endless wind-blown beaches. More jarring is the addition of Helena Bonham Carter embroidered with an Irish accent to add a dab of international glamour to the proceedings. However, the themes of Williams’ tale (who adapts his own novel) do have a certain resonance, dealing as it does with faith, God and predestined love.
The letters of love prove to be a blanket motif, referring both to the epistles written by those enamoured and to the letters of the word love itself, both in English and Latin. Here is a world of cultural yearning, of dashed artistic hopes, with our narrator Nicholas Coughlan (Fionn O'Shea), a love-struck man of letters, his father (Pierce Brosnan), a painter of divine duress, and Gabriel Byrne’s Muiris Gore, a frustrated poet. The film begins with William Coughlan (Brosnan), a civil servant, storming out of his office after seeing the light – a square of sunshine on a letter he was writing – to pursue a penniless life as a painter. “I have to paint. Do you understand?” he barks at his baffled wife, Bette (the singer Imelda May), who quickly goes mad. And so William sets off for the West coast of Ireland, leaving his son, our narrator, to fend for himself.
Meanwhile, the parallel tale of Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly) unfolds as she frolics with her brother Sean (Dónal Finn) on the rocks overlooking the sea. He is playing his flute, while she risks her life dancing on the rocks, to the horror of the more vertiginous among us. But the director Polly Steele flips the coin and it is Sean who comes undone, succumbing to a fit and becoming paralysed and wheelchair-bound. Shortly afterwards, Isabel is packed off to convent school and a new chapter begins…
There is a 1974 French romance directed by Claude Lelouch called Toute une vie, which chronicles the parallel lives of two predestined lovers (and their forebears), until their inevitable first encounter at the film’s end. What is so moving about Lelouch’s film is the inevitability of love, while the director holds our attention with the magic of his cinematic expertise. What Four Letters of Love lacks is a cinematic brio, a visual effervescence that came to Lelouch so effortlessly. Polly Steele’s film is pretty enough, but not with the everyday heft of, say, The Banshees of Inisherin, or its lived-in credibility.
Nonetheless, Steele holds our attention through the vibrant performance of Ann Skelly (Rose Plays Julie) as the quintessentially red-headed colleen and who should be a much bigger star than she is. The other coup is the central McGuffin, a painting that ultimately binds our lovers together but which we are denied from seeing. There is a certain allure about films about paintings (John Crowley’s adaptation of Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch was a brave attempt), and there haven’t been enough of them. Art can transform lives, and so often Four Letters of Love comes close, leaving much to savour, if not to fully believe in while the film is actually on screen.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, Helena Bonham Carter, Fionn O'Shea, Ann Skelly, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Dónal Finn, Imelda May, Pat Shortt, Olwen Fouéré.
Dir Polly Steele, Pro Douglas Cummins and Debbie Gray, Screenplay Niall Williams, from his own novel, Ph Damien Elliott, Pro Des John Leslie, Ed Chris Gill, Music Anne Nikitin, Costumes Susan Scott, Sound Ben Baird, Dialect coach Brendan Gunn and Neil Swain.
Genesius Pictures/AX1 Films/London Town Films/WRAP Fund-Vertigo Releasing.
109 mins. UK/Ireland. 2024. US Rel: 25 April 2025. UK Rel: 18 July 2025. Cert. 12A.
