That They May Face the Rising Sun review – poignant rural meditation on life and friendship

In this adaptation of the John McGahern novel, about a middle-aged man who has returned, with his wife, to the countryside of his childhood, makeshift friendships are forged and life’s grand rhythms observed

‘Does anything happen, or is it the usual?” asks a regular loose cannon in Pat Collins’ rural-set Irish drama. “Not much in the way of drama, just the day-to-day stuff,” replies his writer friend. That’s very much the lay of the land in this film, with squirely novelist Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) serving as a proxy for John McGahern and his early-Joycean realism, and from whose lauded final 2002 novel this is adapted. By extension it speaks for Collins too, who remains a faithful follower of that approach – almost to a fault.

At some point in the 1980s, Joe and his wife Kate (Anna Bederke) – who is from some unspecified European country – have quit London to return to the Irish countryside of his upbringing. With him racking up the pages of a never-finished book, and her twisting local plants into art creations, there’s a bohemian tint to their household that attracts neighbours to their kitchen table. There’s “the Shah” (John Olohan), the big-eyebrowed garage owner tiptoeing into a new romance; Bill (Brendan Conroy), a subdued labourer condemned to working in slave-like conditions because he was “illegitimate”; and the aforementioned loose cannon Patrick (Lalor Roddy), never short of a chippy observation but always popping by like a man who needs company.