L'étrangère

This charming, low-key drama about an Irish teenager and his troubled family relationships is one of Neil Jordan's best pieces of work.

It's certainly his most underrated film, and leaves ALL his American efforts a long way behind.

The gentle, yet disciplined pace of the script and direction shows that Jordan was well and truly on track for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar he went on to collect for his next project, THE CRYING GAME.

In this under-rated film Neil Jordan has created a very real portrait of how some teen-agers actually think and feel. The treatment of such a touchy subject as incest handled with a deft enough touch to almost make it believable.Some editing to cut redundant scenes would have made this a truly great movie. While watching Niall Byrne it was hard not to think of look alike Australian tennis player, Leyton Hewitt.

It is amazing such poetry some directors can create with so little money and The Miracle is just that. The kids may seem obnoxious to some people but they are just teenagers. Beverly D´Angelo is very well as the mysterious lady and the music fits perfectly into the whole movie. I´d love to watch it again if I could find it on tape.

Very much like Jordan's breakthrough, "The Crying Game," this earlier film wraps deftly realized details of contemporary Irish life around a fairy-tale plot, making an otherwise implausible denouement seem inevitable. Though the characters are almost archetypes, the solid performances and generally sharp dialogue freshen an age-old premise, and the banter between Jimmy and Rose is especially notable. The photography is at once unforgiving and lyrical, lending a haunted quality to the decaying seaside setting and evoking a carnivalesque atmosphere. The real star here, though, is Jordan's fundamentally cinematic sensibility; the effect the film creates would be diminished in any other medium. "The Miracle" amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and is one of this director's best efforts.

Two extremely obnoxious kids, plus a boorish father who, if he had truly been a well-developed character, would have beaten the living daylights out of his annoying son, but who instead, since this is a dumb Neil Jordan flic, only whimpers, and a woman of certain age who is no doubt a reject in her attempt to get the role of Jocasta in the Oedipus trilogy---slap these together and boil them lukewarmly, voila: TV soappopper a la Ireland.