Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story
The late Edna O’Brien is a wonderful presence in this film about her life and work.
Gabriel Byrne. Image courtesy of Modern Films.
The distinguished Irish writer Edna O'Brien died on 27th July 2024 aged 93. Fortunately, it was well ahead of that when Sinéad O'Shea put in hand this film about O’Brien's life and career. Consequently, one of the key elements on screen here is the footage of O'Brien herself reminiscing for the film. This interview took place mainly in 2023, was interrupted when she was taken into hospital but was then resumed in April 2024. No less significant is the fact that, although initially doubtful about being involved, O'Brien took to O'Shea and gave her access to her unpublished diaries. These too become a central feature of the film contributing real insights into O'Brien's life and especially into the period when she was married to Ernest Gébler in the years 1954 to 1964. Extracts from the diaries are read by Jessie Buckley and we also see them and the numerous annotations on them made by Gébler which show him to have been unpleasant and jealous of his wife's success.
Quite apart from these important ingredients, the film is able to draw on a vast amount of images from the past. Some of these are personal (home movies, photographs) and others consist of archive material taken from interviews on television. Among those asking the questions we find Melvyn Bragg, Russell Harty and Cliff Michelmore. Fresh comments on O'Brien and her books (she left us thirty-four in total) come from a range of authors, including Anne Enright, Andrew O'Hagan, Louise Kennedy and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. However, the most memorable of these contributions comes from the American writer Walter Mosley when he reveals that he was one of O’Brien’s pupils when she was teaching in New York. He feels that but for O’Brien’s strong encouragement to go ahead and write novels set in a world that he knew he would never have had the career that followed.
For a standard length feature film Blue Road has a lot to pack in regarding O’Brien’s personal life (her sons Carlo and Sasha Gébler comment honestly and openly on the difficult marriage of their parents) and no less so when it comes to her books (it is obviously impossible to mention all of them). Inevitably the most fully considered are her first two novels, The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962) which was notably filmed by Desmond Davis in 1964 under the title Girl with Green Eyes. The first of these made O’Brien's name and that happened not only because it was highly praised (not least in America where it was admired by the likes of J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth and John Updike) but because its sexual candour made it notorious and the Irish censor banned it and its two successors.
The novel’s portrayal of the experience of growing up in rural Ireland echoed O’Brien's own early days in County Clare and she, like the girls in her novel, moved to Dublin to extend her horizons. Gabriel Byrne, another contributor here, emphasises how the literary world in Dublin at that time was essentially male orientated and in taking up with Ernest Gébler, the young Edna O'Brien was involving herself with an older, divorced man strongly disapproved of by her parents. It was only after moving to London that they married. There she would live in the suburbs until a big fee for a screenplay (1972’s Zee and Co.) would enable her to buy a property in Carlyle Square. By then her marriage had ended in divorce but her sons had thankfully chosen to live with her (a letter signed by Gébler calling himself their ex-father confirms the wisdom of their decision). Less happily Gébler would not be the last unreliable man to play an important role in O'Brien's life. In particular we hear of an unnamed member of parliament who treated her badly and there are also references to her period as a patient of the controversial psychoanalyst R.D. Laing who encouraged her to take LSD.
In telling Edna O’Brien's story the film has much ground to cover. The childhood years reveal her difficulties with her parents and especially with her controlling and alcoholic father but they also established her love of the peace to be found in the Irish countryside. Once her books appeared their notoriety certainly brought fame and money too (except when her earnings were pocketed by her husband) but she was also widely attacked and mocked at this early stage of her career. However, once free of Ernest she embraced the glitz, mixed with celebrities and was known for her parties (we glimpse famous names aplenty) yet she came to recognise that she needed more in her life. It would be the writing that would really matter although there would be a time when she would be unable to produce another book for some years and she tells us of how she even came close to suicide. But her writing resumed and would continue. Her gift for words, apparent not only on the printed page but in what she says in the course of this film, never deserted her and, while controversy attached to some of her late work, such novels as The Little Red Chairs (2015) and Girl (2019) continued to command attention and admiration.
Sinéad O’Shea’s film is a relatively straightforward work albeit one with what one might term unexpected decorations. In the segment about R.D. Laing the hallucinations that O'Brien experienced then are illustrated, on occasion clips from the film Girl with Green Eyes almost stand in for her own story, a few shots near the close become stylised by moving backwards and in the background there are frequent passages from well-known pieces of classical music, a harmless device (Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune turns up more than once). There's so much material to cover in such a relatively short time that it could be said that some aspects are somewhat skimped but the film gives us the essentials of an extraordinary life, one which for all its hardships Edna O’Brien would not have changed (she confirms this when looking back). Her strength seems to have grown out of her misfortunes and it is absolutely right that she in person should be the central presence here. Late on there is a touching charity in her attitude to her father when she speaks of their last meeting and the film’s final images relating to her chosen place of burial could not be more apt. As for the title, the words ‘Blue Road’ are not meaningful in themselves but relatively early in the film they are referred to and we realise that the story associated with that description symbolises Edna O’Brien’s unflinching determination to speak her own truth and to be cowed by nobody.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Edna O’Brien, Gabriel Byrne, Carlo Gébler, Sasha Gébler, Walter Mosley, Andrew O’Hagan, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Clair Wills, Anne Enright, Louise Kennedy, Maureen O’Connor, and the voices of Jessie Buckley and Declan Conlon.
Dir Sinéad O’Shea, Pro Claire McCabe, Sinéad O’Shea and Eleanor Emptage, Screenplay Sinéad O’Shea, Ph Eoin McLoughlin and Richard Kendrick, Ed Gretta Ohle, Music George Brennan, Richard Skelton and Gareth Averill.
SOS Prods Ltd/Screen Ireland/Tara Films-Break Out Productions.
99 mins. Ireland. 2024. UK Rel: 18 April 2025. Cert. 12A.
