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Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, creators of ilm-makers, possess an unceasing imagination and keenness for concepts that remains exceptionally essential. Their latest creation, a gripping and raw true-crime narrative, delves into the inner psyche of Rose Dugdale, a wealthy English heiress and debutante who was radicalized at Oxford. Dugdale ultimately joined the IRA and in the early 1970s participated in an infamous art theft at a stately home in the Irish Republic. She also aided in dropping homemade bombs from a stolen helicopter onto a police station.
Baltimore should really be seen in tandem with Lawlor and Molloy’s recent personal essay film The Future Tense about the film-makers’ own complex sense of evolving identities in Ireland and England, inspired by their own experiences making this Dugdale movie. With great intelligence and care, they make the most of a mid-range budget; a bigger Hollywood biopic would undoubtedly have given us Rose’s debutante ball at Buckingham Palace and the later bizarre helicopter attack as two big set pieces (perhaps with two star names in cameo for the royals in the ball scene). Instead, Lawlor and Molloy stage something that is smart and supple and more intimate: the heist scene with three other IRA men, with its chaotic and paranoid aftermath, intercut with moments from her own girlhood, presented as memories or fragments, equivalent in dramatic value to Rose’s nightmares and her terrified sense of what she still might have to do.
Imogen Poots is excellent as Dugdale, seen almost throughout in searching closeup, wondering whether she has it in her to execute a possible witness in cold blood. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Lewis Brophy and Jack Meade are strong as her conspirators and Dermot Crowley is outstanding as Donal, a gentle innocent bystander with fading eyesight, reading To Kill a Mockingbird in braille in his cottage as he receives a disturbing visit from Dugdale. An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.
Source: theguardian.com
