The gray suburban fringes of Cork’s Northside region are gradually colored with hope in “Christy,” an old-fashioned coming-of-age heartwarmer with few narrative surprises but a winningly authentic sense of place, people and vernacular. Following a sullen teenage casualty of the Irish social care system as he’s reunited with his similarly damaged half-brother, slowly regaining a feeling of purpose and belonging in the world, Brendan Canty‘s debut feature is satisfyingly expanded from his 2019 short of the same title. In the process, it has become not just a contained domestic drama but a brightly inhabited study of resilient working-class community in a neglected stretch of Ireland’s second-largest city.
A hit with audiences at the Berlinale — where it opened the festival’s youth-oriented Generation 14plus program, and picked up the section’s top jury prize — Canty’s film has since enjoyed a popular international festival run, proving its cultural particularities no impediment to its universal crossover potential. Having opened last month’s Transilvania fest before appearing in Karlovy Vary’s Horizons program, it will play Galway and Edinburgh before its Irish and U.K. release in late summer. Ultimately sunny and often ebullient — down to a communal hip-hop number at its close — this is an honest crowdpleaser that nonetheless works hard for its emotional uplift, comparable in theme and appeal to recent Irish Oscar nominee “The Quiet Girl,” albeit with scrappier execution.
When we encounter 17-year-old Christy (Danny Power, repeating his role from the short) at the film’s outset, it’s hard to imagine his stern perma-scowl uncreasing any time soon. Since the death of his mother years before, he’s been bounced from one foster home to another, never settling in any of them, and turning guarded and combative in the process. Having been ejected from his most recent home after fighting with another boy, he’s now in limbo: Nearly too old for social care but not yet able to take care of himself, he’s sought refuge with his older half-brother Shane (Diarmaid Noyes), who shares a humble council house with his partner Stacey (Emma Willis) and their infant child.
The arrangement, Shane briskly insists, is strictly temporary: There’s little love lost between two siblings who, having grown up years apart under separate roofs, scarcely know each other at all. A self-employed painter-decorator who prides himself on sticking to the straight and narrow, Shane harbors his own trauma from years in the care system — what the brothers have in common, however, threatens to keep them apart more than it brings them together. It takes the frustrated Stacey, played with warmth and good humor by Willis in what could be a stock part, to delicately referee the men’s prickly silences, and initiate some manner of bridging conversation between them.
Until that happens, however, Christy finds kinship elsewhere — chiefly in a rough-edged but gentle-souled gaggle of local kids unofficially led by mouthy wheelchair-user Robot (Jamie Forde), who draws the newcomer out of his shell by sheer force of charisma. Meanwhile Pauline (Helen Behan), a close friend of his late mom, steps in to offer some of the surrogate mothering he’s been missing all this time, eventually offering him modestly paid work in her home hair salon. Christy, it emerges, has a genuine, self-taught knack for barbering: a viable route to a stable living, if he can just resist the lure of his circling gangster cousins.
This is the stuff of old-as-the-hills melodrama, as a vulnerable youngster is caught between good and, well, less good life paths. (Nobody is really evil in “Christy,” a film sensitive to the social and economic circumstances than can throw anyone off-course — though a stray plot strand centered on an addict played by “Saltburn” star Alison Oliver feels more contrived than the rest.) A pair of convincingly bruised, wary but slowly thawing turns from Power and Noyes go a long way toward keeping things real: Power, possessed of both little-boy-lost fragility and keen, dry wit, is an especially promising performer.
Mostly, the film skirts outright moralistic cliché, just as it also eschews brutal kitchen-sink realism to land somewhere in the middle: sentimental but suitably lived-in, humanely optimistic but not blindly naïve regarding the realities of poverty and inadequate welfare in modern Ireland. Canty, previously a music video director who landed an MTV VMA nomination for Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” clip, is an unextravagant but subtly assured visual stylist attuned to flashes of organic beauty amid textures of tarmac and pebble-dash, while DP Colm Hogan’s camera is most interested in the planes and furrows of faces that have lived a lot in relatively few years. When Christy cracks even a tight smile, it’s close to a hallelujah moment.