Bloom

It’s hard to find anything very positive to say about this uninspiring version of ‘Ulysses’. Joseph Strick’s slightly leaden 1967 version of Joyce’s masterpiece at least had its fine Dublin location-work and caught some of the tumbling vitality of the exile’s tribute to his city. Perhaps Sean Walsh’s day in the life of Jewish copy-taker Bloom (Stephen Rea, at his most crestfallen and Stan Laurel-esque) looked better on paper. There’s a funereal air to Bloom’s perambulations – to work, to library, pub and brothel. There are no epiphanies for Hugh O’Conor’s under-charged Stephen Dedalus, but Angeline Ball is suitably tarty as his ‘cuckolding’ wife Molly, but it seems a mistake to open the film with her climactic ‘Yes’ speech. The absence of acoustic sound,too, gives the film an eerie quality, declining into Jarman-esque camp in the foot-fetish fantasy of the Nighttown re-enactments.