The April mini-mini-season film programme starts from Wednesday 21^st April. Doors open at approximately 8:15 and please allow a few extra minutes to allow time for signing-up/paying.

The following films have been voted in by our members:

21st April

Coco Before Chanel

28th April

Il Postino

All films are screened in the Skerries Sailing Club. The film screening times are:

The unbelievably modest membership rates for this two night blockbuster mini-mini-season are
€20.00 – 2 films & meal
€10.00 - first film only
€15.00 – second night only (film & meal)

Given that this season is so short, we aren't intending to offer other options such as shared membership.

21^st Apr 2010  – Coco Before Chanel (Coco avant Chanel)
France, 105 mins
Dir: Anne Fontaine,
Starring: Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, Marie Gillain, Emmanuelle Devos, Régis Royer, Etienne Bartholomeus, Yan Duffas

Spectacle, a love triangle, heritage settings, bravura acting, witty dialogue, a bittersweet finale: There's something for everyone in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel. There also is -- not the least of the movie's pleasures -- the sense of a keen intelligence marshaling and shaping the material, shunning cliche and sentimentality and creating meaning out of what for once is not the standard biopic procedure of ticking off the boxes in a celebrity CV.

Fontaine's focus is on Chanel's formative years just before World War I, the transition from the modest, virtually peasant background of her childhood to the world of fashion and haute couture that she came to revolutionize. The young Gabrielle (Audrey Tautou), or Coco as she soon became known, meets and moves in with the wealthy racehorse owner Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), leading the life of a courtesan, resenting her dependence, keeping a tight rein on her emotions and all the time observing and learning from the elevated circles in which she finds herself. She is befriended by another of Balsan's many mistresses, the actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos), who encourages her to develop her talents and strike out on her
own. She then finds love in the shape of Arthur "Boy" Capel (the U.S.-born Alessandro Nivola), an English businessman who steals her from under Balsan's nose and finally sets her up in business.

The love story is engagingly done, but Fontaine's core interest is in showing how Coco becomes Chanel, in pointing out the markers along the path that led a penniless young woman, with no resources other than her inner strength, to become a key figure in shaping contemporary tastes in style and design.

Tautou fully inhabits the role of Coco, her face a mask as if her character has yet to determine which identity she is to assume, sexually as much as socially. The flamboyant Balsan, by contrast, appears to be all of a piece -- Poelvoorde is excellent, stealing many of the scenes he appears in -- but Fontaine shows that his force-of-nature persona too is a mask, concealing deeper vulnerabilities. Coco is Fontaine's first venture into costume drama, but her portrayal of a woman
making her way in a perilous prefeminist world is wholly convincing. Alexandre Desplat's score is tasteful and unobtrusive and the period detail impeccable. - Bernard Besserglik, Hollywood Reporter

28^th Apr 2010  – Il Postino
Italy/France/Belgium, 108 mins
Dir: Michael Radford,
Starring: Philippe Noiret,Massimo Troisi, Maria Grazia Cucinotta

"The Postman" should be considered the sacred domain of the late Massimo Troisi, whose comic talents transform this Italian tragicomedy and whose death hangs mythically over everything. Postponing a heart operation to complete the project, the 41-year-old actor died 12 hours after filming was completed.

The movie, a loose adaptation of Antonio Skarmeta's novel "Burning Patience," is inspired by an incident in the life of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and diplomat who was briefly exiled on the Italian island of Capri. In the movie, set in the 1950s on a remote island with no running water, Neruda (Philippe Noiret) comes for temporary solace, but instead finds eternal satisfaction in a land of good-hearted, illiterate fishermen. More importantly, in Mario (Troisi) he finds a lifelong (and utterly fictional) friendship.

Not long after his arrival, the celebrated poet (a 1950s superstar) is besieged with letters, most of them from women. This volume of fan mail creates the need for a personal letter carrier. Mario, a fisherman's unemployed but literate son, applies for the job, and a special relationship begins.

Mario, who bears daily armfuls of correspondence, is awed by his single client who is awaiting-among other things-word of a possible Nobel prize. At first, he asks Neruda to autograph one of his poetry books. Then, Mario becomes increasingly courageous and inquisitive. He questions Neruda about the mystical creation of poetry. When Neruda explains "metaphor" to him with the sentence "the sky is weeping," Mario's eyes are opened to untold possibilities.

Having just fallen in love with local bombshell Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), who runs a restaurant and plays a mean game of table soccer, he's more than abstractly interested in the art's dramatic effects on women. Neruda, who likes this pushy but sweet local, becomes his Latin Cyrano de Bergerac and helps him with his romantic mission.

On one level, this bucolic buddy movie comes perilously close to overendearing Italian-movie territory. (It even has the sort of enchanted isle found in "Mediterraneo.") But the screenplay (which is credited to a small crowd: director Michael Radford, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli, Giacomo Scarpelli and Troisi) is refreshingly witty and restrained. And Troisi, whose thin, stubbled features suggest a Mediterranean combination of Ralph Nader, John Cleese and David Byrne, takes the potentially cheap situation and enriches it. When he begs Neruda to create a poem that will charm Beatrice, the aging wordsmith is reluctant. The mailman retorts that, with all the fuss the old man is kicking up over one poem, he doesn't think Neruda has a chance of taking the Nobel. The simplicity of the statement, uttered in Troisi's halting, firm manner, is subtly hilarious. Underneath this apparent simpleton is the presence of a great comedian, who should have had the opportunity to do so much more.- Desson Howe, Washington Post