Pavee Lackeen (Traveller Girl)

3 out of 5 3
Pavee Lackeen
'Unsentimental' ... Pavee Lackeen

Irish Travellers have a tricky reputation in the UK. They're arousing indignation in the Home Counties, they're accused of sending property prices into free fall; most mortifyingly of all, they're being played by Brad Pitt in ropey gangster Britflicks. We can only hope Pavee Lackeen is not remade by Hollywood, in case Brad is prevailed upon to reprise his lairy turn, complete with iffy hat.

  1. Pavee Lackeen - The Traveller Girl
  2. Production year: 2005
  3. Country: Ireland
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 88 mins
  6. Directors: Perry Ogden
  7. Cast: Paddy Maughan, Rosie Maughan, Winnie Maughan
  8. More on this film

As it stands, Perry Ogden's film - developed from a documentary photographic project called Pony Kids - is a low-budget realist film shot on video, about Travellers living in grim wasteland-suburbs outside Dublin, far from Ireland's 21st-century Celtic Tiger prosperity. I expected miserablism or special pleading: but Ogden's film is unsentimental about drinking, thieving and drugs, and it is amiably watchable, despite being almost narrativeless.

Ogden uses non-professionals and their heavy accent evidently requires subtitles for release here, though everyone is frankly more comprehensible than Brad Pitt ever was. The star is Winnie Maughan, a 10-year-old Traveller girl with a telegenic face that reminded me of Émilie Dequenne in the Dardenne brothers' trailer-park tragedy Rosetta. She has nine siblings (in fact as well as fiction, as far as I can judge) and her mother Rose is avowedly 43, but looks far older.

Winnie begins the film by getting sent home from school for a week for bad behaviour: a funny scene in which she calls someone a "whore" at breaktime for cheating at Bristol Bulldog. Ogden's film swings easily along as Winnie cruises around on her bike in her free week, nicks things from shops, hangs out disconsolately with her mates, and is a mute, uncomprehending witness as her family's caravan existence gets incrementally worse by the day. The council has moved them on to some even rougher ground, because the bulldozers are coming in to prepare their old patch for housing, and the Travellers and their activist solicitors realise too late that it is a ruse to get them on to non-council-owned territory so the authorities are not responsible for ensuring the children have school places.

But the Travellers have no very passionate attachment to school and they themselves make no political capital from this exclusion-victimhood. It is merely something else to deal with, and they have no settled purpose other than getting by. Winnie and her mate get new clothes through a new variation of dumpster-diving: Winnie has to climb bodily inside a clothes recycling bin and bizarrely flip garments out though the swing-lever while suppressing claustrophobia and panic.

The most likely eventuality is that Winnie will grow up to be like her mum Rose, who is shown gathered round a fire with the mottled, flickeringly lit faces of her menfolk, passing round drink; it's a scene which could have come from decades or centuries before. Rose cheerfully threatens to sing The Wild Colonial Boy, and what a scene that would have made. Sadly, it doesn't materialise.

At the top of the movie, Winnie has her palm read by her shrewd gran, and is told to follow her head and not her heart. She nods politely, but the distinction does not appear to mean much, implying a branch in the decision-making tree that may not be there. Following her head or her heart - what would the difference be? Ogden does not force an answer on us; he just follows Winnie at the beginning of a life that is being lived, uneasily, between freedom and dispossession.

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