The intriguing, complex movies of the married writer-directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have always been about imposture, concealment, double lives and alternative existences – particularly in what I think may be their masterpiece, the drama-thriller Rose Plays Julie. Now they have composed this fiercely personal essay movie about themselves and their family histories, loosely structured around the idea of a plane journey between London and Dublin. Lawlor and Molloy are shown separately narrating into microphones, and “interviewing” people filmed in separate locations, a conceit apparently imposed during lockdown.
It is a semi-dramatised reverie and revelation which exposes a painful new insight into their experiences as Irish expatriate artists in the UK; they are considering a return to Ireland now that post-Brexit England seems increasingly reactionary and xenophobic, while also being aware of the reactionary forces at work in Irish politics. They are also aware that their daughter, having been brought up in England, may not wish to join them. Have they also been concealing double lives as Irish people in England?
The film also muses on their planned project about Rose Dugdale, the wealthy and pampered English debutante who became an IRA volunteer and carried out violent raids in Northern Ireland having been radicalised by the student protests of 1968 and a trip to Cuba. Is the Rose Dugdale film something that the couple have now abandoned or still wish to make? Or is its sole purpose to appear in this film? Certainly Dugdale’s startling connection with Ireland has a weird, indirect resonance with their own family history: Lawlor’s grandparents and parents found themselves moved by economic and political forces from Ireland to the US.
The title is taken from Walter Abish’s story collection In the Future Perfect, whose opening story The English Garden puzzles Lawlor because there appears to be no English garden in it. Perhaps it is an echo of Munich’s Englischer Garten, where notorious Nazi groupie Unity Mitford gruesomely attempted to take her own life when Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Unity was a cousin of Lady Clementine Beit, from whose Russborough House in County Wicklow Rose Dugdale famously stole Old Masters and demanded a cash ransom.
The Future Tense is an absorbing part of the Lawlor-Molloy body of work; a densely significant filmic text in which passion and pain are kept in check, but always simmering close to the surface.
• The Future Tense is released on 23 August on Mubi.
