This movie is melodramatic, sentimental and overwrought ... but I enjoyed it

Though the cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne, this film’s real star is Irish actor Ann Skelly, who can say 1000 words with a single look.

Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne in Four Letters of Love. Picture: Vertigo Releasing

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If I had to pick the usual suspects of a film set in Ireland, I’d choose, in no particular order, love, rain, God, tears and WB Yeats. What I don’t expect to see are bovine art critics, and their appearance is a humorous highlight of the romantic drama Four Letters of Love.

This movie is based on the best-selling 1997 debut novel by Irish writer Niall Williams and he has adapted his own work. He’s made some interesting alterations but even so it is perhaps a case where a screenwriter’s helping hand may have been useful. It is directed by British filmmaker Polly Steele and the cast includes stars such as Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne. The real star, though, is Irish actor Ann Skelly as Isabel Gore, a young woman exploring and navigating her own heart. She can say 1000 words with a single look, such as when a suitor indirectly says she is beautiful. Or, a little later, when she asks the same man if he loves her.

Pierce Brosnan in Four Letters of Love.

The story is set in the 1970s and moves between Dublin and an island off the west coast of Ireland. William Coughlan (Brosnan) is a civil servant who suddenly, on hearing from God, decides to become an artist.

“God told me to be a painter and said not one word more,’’ he tells his 17-year-old son Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) as he abandons him and his mother and heads to the west to paint.

Schoolteacher and poet Muiris Gore (Byrne) and his wife Margaret (Bonham Carter) live on the island. Isabel is their freethinking late teen daughter. Early on she heads to Dublin to attend a strict Catholic school, where she meets the aforementioned suitor, Peder Luing (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo).

Various circumstantial shifts – some of which involve art and poetry – result in Isabel and Nicholas being on the same bus from Dublin to the west. “In a different love story,’’ says Nicholas, who part-narrates the story, “we met here and this moment matters. I saw you but did not see you that day.”

So we have a beautiful, spirited young woman who has a suitor and another young man who thinks he is in love with her and they are fated to be together. The fact Nicholas part-narrates the story raises doubts. Is the idea of love as destiny only in his imagination, for example?

This film asks interesting questions about love, relationships, marriage, commitment, women and men that I suspect a lot of viewers will relate to. The author-screenwriter is at his best when he uses dialogue to bring his words to the screen.

Irish actor Ann Skelly is the real star in Four Letters of Love.

Here’s Margaret telling her daughter about love: “There is no stopped clock of the heart in which happiness holds. It rises and falls. For it to last a lifetime it has to be immense.” She adds that “falling in love is easy” but what follows is “years of hard labour”.

Here’s William when some cows stomp over paintings he stored in a barn. “This was how it was meant to be.” It reminds me of Charles ­Bukowski regarding one of his cats as a harsh but fair critic when it soiled one of his poems.

Speaking of poets, the influence of Yeats becomes clear, as do the four letters of the title, as Isabel labours with love.

This movie is melodramatic, sentimental and overwrought but I enjoyed it.

It starts out as a love story, which appeals to my soppy side, but develops into something more interesting, something that might be seen as the opposite of love.

Four Letters of Love (M)

109 minutes

In cinemas

★★★