Irish Film Institute -BLOOM

BLOOM

Director: SEAN WALSH

IRELAND • 2003 • COLOUR • DOLBY DIGITAL STEREO • 113 MIN


TO TIE IN WITH THIS YEAR’S BLOOMSDAY CELEBRATIONS, WE’RE PLEASED TO SHOW SEAN WALSH’S ADAPTATION OF JOYCE’S ULYSSES.
Starring Stephen Rea as the mock-heroic everyman Leopold Bloom, Angeline Ball (one of the sirens in The Commitments) as his carnal and cuckolding wife Molly, and Hugh O’Conor as the young artist-intellectual Stephen Dedalus, Walsh’s film is largely faithful to Joyce’s text but does not treat it as sacred. Molly’s famous closing and climaxing soliloquy, for example, is used to open the film and frame the action. The plot, as much as one exists, remains largely intact. Dialogue is drawn directly from the novel, and the internal thought processes of the three central characters are presented as voiceovers. Walsh says his overriding intention was to make the film work as a story, to be at once intelligent and accessible. Critical reaction to the film was mixed, but no less an authority than David Norris hailed it as ‘brilliant, witty, innovative and faithful to Joyce’s work.’

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