Cal review – grieving Helen Mirren superb in compassionate Troubles romance

Mirren won best actress at Cannes in 1984 for her role as Marcella, who forms a relationship with John Lynch’s Cal – a man complicit in her husband’s murder

Pat O’Connor’s Northern Irish movie from 1984, adapted by author Bernard MacLaverty from his own novel, holds up very well for its rerelease; better in fact than most of the movies and TV drama made about and during the Troubles. It has an unhurried, thoughtful and very human quality; Helen Mirren won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance here and in fact it is very well acted across the board by a blue-chip cast.

Mirren plays Marcella, a woman from a Catholic background, married across the sectarian divide to a reserve police officer murdered at his parents’ farmhouse by an IRA man who had bullied a bewildered local guy into being his getaway driver; this is Cal, played by the gauntly intense John Lynch. Cal lives with his widowed father; a gentle performance by Donal McCann, who was Gabriel Conroy in John Huston’s The Dead. But as the only Catholics in a Protestant neighbourhood, they are burned out of their home by loyalist gangs. Having quit his job at the gruesome abattoir, Cal gets a job labouring at Marcella’s farm and is allowed to live in an outbuilding; Marcella’s fiercely Protestant brother-in-law and mother-in-law (excellent performances from Ray McAnally and Catherine Gibson) take pity and almost a shine to the poor, put-upon Cal. And Cal, despite or because of being secretly complicit in the murder of Marcella’s husband, and intensely aware of her loneliness and ambiguous nameless yearning, falls deeply in love with her.

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