Joyriders

Walsh's directorial debut is the story of downtrodden Dubliner Mary Flynn (Kerrigan), who breaks away from her domineering husband and leaves her kids at the railway left luggage to go in search of something more. Something more turns out to be leather-jacketed Perky Rice (Connolly), an incorrigible car thief and desperate romantic who whisks her off on a joyride through the rolling Irish countryside. Along the way, Mary meets an ageing country and western star (Whitelaw), who orgainses tea-dances in a dilapidated seaside resort, and a weathered hill farmer (Kelly), whose observations bring some humour to an otherwise straight-laced film. Andy Smith's screenplay occasionally touches poignantly on the insurmountable breach between the characters' wishful flights of fancy and the reality of their cramped lives, but in the end the film suffers from a narrowness of vision: lighting, camerawork, and direction all seem bound by the constraints of the small plot, so that neither the passion nor the tragedy of the runaways is ever given full rein.