Reefer and the Model
[1988 / 80 mins / Colour / 35mm / 1.85:1 format]
Trying to leave behind a violent past, the brutal, disenchanted Reefer, a self-styled ‘Fenian Aristocrat’, now runs a crumbling trawler transporting passengers and goods to the islands from the Irish mainland. When he picks up hitchhiker Teresa, a gentle ex-prostitute and reformed addict, and brings her on board with his partners, Spider, an IRA man exiled from the North, and Badger, a gay man with a criminal past, things start to change. Initially suspicious of Teresa, Reefer gradually falls in love and tries to establish an ‘alternative family’, setting off a succession of vibrant, tone-shifting set-pieces that push the group irrevocably back to the other side of the law. Reefer and the Model is a darkly entertaining comedy-thriller in which the director’s customary socio-political analysis is filtered through a lively conventional style. Above all, however, the film is pure amour fou as the unlikely quartet struggle for love and stability in the face of convention. As the film’s publicity tag-line put it, they are ‘more afraid of love than the law’.
[eugene finn]
“The film is a love story, and an anti-love story. It’s an astonishingly vivid character study, and it’s a blackly farcical thriller, a brutally honest look at the way we are… See this film: it has echoes and resonances that go on for ever.”
— IN DUBLIN Magazine
“Utterly callous!'
[Evening Press]
“Joe Comerford has a terribly beautiful story to tell and he told it superbly well”
— Cork Examiner