Ryan's Daughter

Annotation for KRRR! 2014 by Michal Škamla

Many people associate the name of British director David Lean with the magnificent film productions of the 1950s and 1960s (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago). However, this morbidly perfectionist auteur, who is said to have spent months waiting for the right light, was not just a storyteller of opulent stories. On the contrary, he was paradoxically one of the most “intimate” filmmakers to ever work in Hollywood. After all, almost all of his films are (despite their eventual monumentality) primarily psychological dives into the souls of their protagonists.

Lean’s later film Ryan’s Daughter (1970) is such an intimate story of epic proportions, in which the director conveys two parallel unfolding levels: first, the marriage and then the love affair of the protagonist Rosa, and second, the conflict between Irish citizens and the British that takes place simultaneously. He then uses the three-hour footage to be able to discuss both convincingly and comprehensively. On the one hand, we watch a story of human hatred and the impossibility of mutual understanding, and on the other, a formally elaborate romantic film about a dreamer who made the wrong decision in choosing a life partner. In my opinion, the viewer will be primarily interested in the carefully composed scenes, suggestively presenting Rosa's psychological state. The most striking is the sequence of the wedding and the first married night, which convincingly captures the heroine's nervousness, dissatisfaction and subsequent insight. Ryan's Daughter also contains - similar to other famous blockbusters by David Lean - a number of spectacular images in which he manages to impressively convey not only the characters, but also their relationship to the environment. These images also serve as certain "natural metaphors" that sometimes add a humorous dimension to the scenes, making the otherwise rather joyless story of this exceptional work special.