Maeve

'Men's relationship to women is just like England's relationship to Ireland.' This assertion made to an ex-boyfriend by the heroine, on a return visit to her Catholic minority family in her native Belfast after a period of self-chosen exile in the (for her) liberating atmosphere of cosmopolitan London, signposts just what's wrong with this film. For, ambitious though it is, and largely successful in portraying the lived detail of the banality of bigotry operating in British Army-occupied Belfast, what Maeve conspicuously fails to do is to convincingly conflate its heroine's feminist concerns with those of the committed Republican boyfriend. Their dialogues finally find no point of intersection, and the film, like Maeve, seems to settle for its 'right not to know what (it's) doing'. An important effort, therefore, but a missed opportunity.