Irish filmmaker/actor Colin Hickey follows his dialogue-free short feature The Evening Redness of the Sun with another nonverbal essay/docu-drama/art installation of even greater brevity. Though divided into three “acts,” Where the Merrows Roam is an immersive portrait of coastal Irish village life. The visuals are beautiful, though the contents are very much up to interpretation.
For those who may not know, a “merrow” is another Celtic term covering the mythical sea people, aka mermaids, and mermen. Here, under a bright Hibernian sun and blue skies, we see young people and children at play, while graver and more careworn adults (one embodied by Colin Hickey) work around the docks or just stare meditatively.
Rusting metal drums and dead animals may portend an environmental message, but in the second act, we realize these are depredations of an intense little boy (Thomas Hickey) with an air rifle (no animal killings are shown on camera). Other children are more merciful; girls at the seaside carefully pick through the seaweed and flotsam they have drawn up from the ocean in pails and set free some small crabs.
Near the end, a newly built (or at least fresh-painted and refurbished) boat launches, explaining the activity of the older men we have been watching, perhaps offering a mixed verdict on people who both revere and despoil nature at the same time. In any case, life goes on.
There is almost no camera movement in the individual sequences. Longtime art-house scenesters may be reminded of Soviet-era Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajdanov’s 1969 The Color of Pomegranates, ostensibly a wordless, costumed biography of an 18th-century poet-musician, but rendered in a succession of static, almost action-free scenes suffused with folk imagery and pictorial splendor, not narrative; some viewers acclaimed it one of the greatest films ever made, while others (especially Kremlin bureaucrats) were baffled.
Those in the former category may be adventurous enough to be drawn to Where the Merrows Roam. Otherwise, at least armchair tourists will get a NatGeo-vivid pageant of a slice of Ireland, with only a music track for the interruption. Optional for public libraries and suitable for expanding Irish film collections.
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