The Quiet Girl

Perhaps some might suggest this requires a “spoiler alert.”

The last scene ends on an unresolved question. Eleven-year-old Caite is in the arms of her mother's cousin Eibhlin’s husband, Sean, as they weepingly cling to each other. But down the road looms her brutish, selfish, irresponsible, drunken and adulterous father, Da. 

The question: Will her father insist on taking her back, another mouth to feed but another servant to use? Or will he risk the loss of face and free his daughter to the more nourishing life she discovered in her summer with the cousin? 

It’s the old “Lady or the tiger?” trick I remember from Grade IX (with no idea what short story that’s from.) 

Perhaps we’re not given the answer so we’re free to choose which we prefer. I can imagine some viewers rigid enough in their sense of filial obligation to require the pathetic girl to return to her parents' overcrowded and stifling condition. It takes a leap of the imagination but I can imagine someone who would prefer that ending. Think Republican. 

At my (Canadian) matinee I’m certain 110% (staff included) wanted her to be taken back to her cousins. There she was well fed, properly dressed, excused for mistakes and mainly embraced with love by the couple who had lost their only child. The stifled child from her large, penurious family, becomes the other couple’s loved replacement of their dead son.

That optimistic ending finds some support in Da’s earlier instruction to his wife: “Tell them they can keep her for as long as they like.” But that was when she was raggedy, suppressed at home and bullied at school. When the cousins return her well-dressed, more grown (i.e., more useful) to the family burdened by a newborn son, he may decide not to free her. The 1981 rural Ireland setting may support such a tribal conclusion.

We certainly enjoy watching her blossom at the cousins’. She speaks freely, laughs, improves her reading ability (after a humiliation at school) and even “runs like the wind” in a burst of open joy. Her every pore silently cries out against having to return to her cruel home. Desperate, she runs to catch up with those loving supporters. But Da comes lumbering up.

Withholding the question is not resolved  in favour of a deeper meaning. Caite’s ending uncertain, we witness Sean’s growth in emotional openness. Sean does not have wife Eibhlin’s immediate embrace of the recessive child. He can ignore her, be curt, even scold her. He may be the more frozen in grieving his son. But as the couple warm Caite into blossoming, she erodes Sean’s crust. Now he can share his wife’s desire to keep the girl and feel her despair at returning. Suspending her fate, the last shot reveals Sean’s growth in emotions. Like Caite, he is enriched and freed from their respective repressions. Whatever Caite's home, she and Sean have through each other recovered an emotional life. That is clearly the happiest ending, because it brings them interior peace, regardless of where the girl will live.