Written and directed by Sinéad O’Shea, a 93-year-old Irish writer Edna O’Brien recounts her controversial life, novels, love affairs, and stardom through personal journals read by actress Jessie Buckley, with perspectives from writers like Gabriel Byrne and Walter Mosley.
You could tell the sort of life that Edna O’Brien led in the height of her fame purely from the amount of name dropping that goes on in the opening scenes. It’s an impressive list of famous faces and while you’d think that might mean it was showing off, it isn’t. All it does is serve to prove how beloved O’Brien was and that’s also what Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story does to a tee. If you go into this not familiar with the author, you’ll come out with a desire to read anything she has written.
Sinéad O’Shea has put together a documentary which is effortlessly charming and yet at the same time, it manages to walk a fairly sad, complicated path. It’s edited in a clever manner to introduce you to O’Brien, gain your attention with its infectious personality and then hit you with the harder stuff once you’re glued in. You learn how inherently interesting and intelligent she was before diving into the hardships of her life and how they were both channelled into her work and hindered it.
If you’ve ever watched any documentary about women authors in the years before the nineties, you’ll have seen how much they had to battle with men for respect, whether that be in their personal or professional lives, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a particularly good example. Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is another good example, showing the range of misogyny from her husband to politicians to in the press, there’s an expanse of pettiness, bitterness and prude perspectives. While O’Brien was a strong woman, all of that constant fighting takes its toll, and you can sense that in the documentary.
Her story becomes unexpectedly and deeply sad, which again goes to the credit of Sinéad O’Shea for how well the documentary is constructed to flow with such impact. The mix of talking heads and archive footage is also perfectly balanced. There’s a really strong focus to it but it never feels heavy, the progression is excellent and coming in at just under a hundred minutes was an ideal runtime.
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a tribute to a wonderful, whip smart woman but also explores the issues she was passionate about. The Troubles are clearly a part of England’s past, not just Northern Ireland but are rarely acknowledged, so this documentary serves as another strong reminder. It flows so well, evolving from a lighter look at how she became a writer to the complicated nature of her work and personal life. It can be at one point very funny and at another incredibly sad. It’s a truly terrific documentary from Sinéad O’Shea which shows exactly how this type of film should be done.
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