Movie review: The Queen of Ireland

(image via IMDb)
(image via IMDb)

 

In this age of movie blockbusters, megaphone-loud social media outbursts and viral demagoguery, we have become accustomed to heroes, revolutionaries and agents of real and lasting change as being swashbucklingly larger than life.

After all, anyone who is capable of accomplishing any kind of societal transformation must be someone who bestrides the globe, whose words resonate with cacophonous intent every time they speak, whose every action is calculated and dramatically impacting.

But The Queen of Ireland, which charts the life of the Emerald Isle’s premier drag queen and inadvertent social activist Panti Bliss aka Rory O’Neill, reminds us in ways both powerful and profoundly quiet that you can be a force to be reckoned with simply by being present, by saying what needs to be said when it needs to be said, and by being willing to stand up and be counted.

None of these acts are small or inconsequential but they are not what we typically associate with the kinds of heroes that our modern age, and indeed many ages past, have emulated as the epitome of courage and tenacity.

And yet by her own admission Panti Bliss, who has never chosen to demonstrably set herself up as any kind of hero, calling herself an accidental activist on more than one occasion, has made a profound impact on the social fabric of Ireland, being responsible in part for the decision by the Irish people in May 2015 to legalise same sex marriage.

Given that homosexuality was only decriminalised in the once-staunchly Catholic country as recently as 1993, that is seismic change, the likes of which most countries never witness, and yet Ireland has traversed this course, with Panti Bliss one of its strongest advocates and cheerleaders.

She would be the first to admit that she was not the first person to hoist their LGBTQI flag above the parapet – the film features Senator David Norris who, for many years, was the sole public gay in the Irish village – but she has by any measure been the most influential, gathering up public support for an often-marginalised, poorly-treated minority.

And yet for all her drag queen bravura and willingness to put herself on the line for what she believes in, the man behind her, Rory O’Neill from the small country market town of Ballinrobe, County Mayo in a loving and supportive family, is as gracious, self-effacing and un-diva like as they come.

 

 

The genius of this smartly written and constructed documentary is that it manages to balance the idea of a revolutionary gamechanger, step-in-step with the massive societal changes in Ireland, with the accidental activist, a man who though profoundly articulate and considered, seems to both embrace and be happy to step away from the spotlight.

The Queen of Ireland, directed and co-written (with Phillip McMahon, Panti Bliss’s close friend and long time creative collaborator) Conor Horgan, charts the substantial changes in Ireland while never losing sight of a man who in many ways has been at the centre of it all.

That is quite an achievement given how greatly Ireland has been changed in such a short period of time; it would all too easy to lose the story of one man in the midst of all those great changes.

And yet The Queen of Ireland remains firmly focused throughout, using O’Neill’s life, and those of close friends and collaborators as a prism through which to view and appreciate these changes.

O’Neill himself is far too low maintenance and humble a man to ever view himself in such terms but the truth is he has been at the forefront of many of the events described in the film, and Ireland would not be the same without his presence.

It is his sage perspective that provides a context to the historic win for marriage equality activists when he observes that for all the vitriol and histrionic allegations flung about during the six month long campaign leading up the vote by opponents of the vote for equality, that what won out in the end was the humanity of peoples’ lives.

 

 

In other words, it became apparent to anyone who eyes to see and ears to hear that what was at stake here for LTBTQI people was some not dry academic argument about rights and equality but the very future of their lives – their sense of self, their friendships, their relationships, their ability to feel accepted in their own country.

It’s a powerful testament and one that the people of Ireland, who have observed over a long period of time how real, genuine and yes ballsily forward and brave Panti Bliss came to appreciate simply by O’Neill telling it honestly and affectingly just how it is.

At its heart however, though it does chronicle Ireland’s titanic change from stiflingly-closed Catholic country to liberal, open and largely inclusive society, The Queen of Ireland is the story of Rory O’Neill, a man who admits that while he breathed life into his creation, one which found her genesis in the nightclubs of early ’90s Tokyo, she breathed far life back into him.

She was, he admits, the making of him as a person, giving him a platform to say what he felt needed to be said in a way that he might not have otherwise managed.

While he has to struggle with a HIV-diagnosis, and the controversy over innocuous comments made by him on a national chat show, Panti Bliss has given, and indeed Ireland as a whole, far, far more than she has taken, reminding everyone in the process that it is often the quiet ones, the people who don’t seek out the spotlight, who end up as a voice for change simply by doing what they love and believe in, that make the most lasting and profound of changes, and change the world we live in for the better.

 

 

 

 

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