What's it all about?

PROVOCATION: Being a scriptwriter is a bit like being a sperm-donor,says Brian Lynch, who wrote the controversial Love and Rage…

PROVOCATION: Being a scriptwriter is a bit like being a sperm-donor,says Brian Lynch, who wrote the controversial Love and Rage, which was filmed in Achill

Revisionist rubbish. Sadistic. Misogynistic. Homophobic. Pornographic. Anti-sexual. Amusing. Old-fashioned. Ground-breaking. Post-modern. I've heard all this said of Cathal Black's film Love and Rage, for which I wrote the script. (To tell the truth, I inserted "amusing" myself, because, well, if I don't I fear nobody else will.) Please note that I'm talking here more about the script than the film. The film emphatically belongs to the director, and I doubt if he thinks about it as I do. In fact I suspect he reacts to me saying "my film" the way I do when I hear Martin McGuinness saying "my country". Which brings me back to the revisionist rubbish accusation.

Actually, the charge tickles me because my intention was to tickle the closet greens, with a view to hearing how they would scoff or sniff at it - and I'm able to report that they can do both at the same time, which is a good trick but not a very pretty sound. To say Love and Rage is obviously intended to provoke the Provos may seem far from obvious: the film is, after all, set in the 1890s. And yet the echoes come back loud and clear: a man convicted of near-murder escapes from Portlaoise prison and flees to the UnS where Irish-Americans hail him as a hero, he gets his photo taken with the president and his extradition is refused by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the offence was "political".

"The National Question" was not the only political subject that interested me in writing the script. The politics of literary and cultural history, for instance, are lurking in the foreground. The man who committed the crime in question, James Lynchehaun, was, at least in part, The Playboy of the Western World - he's referred to in the play as "the man (who) bit the Yellow Woman's nostril on the northern shore". Actually he bit it off completely and thereafter the Yellow Woman wore a silver nose.

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(Her name was Agnes MacDonnell, she was English, and she was occasionally to be seen going the roads in Achill, a ghost suitably veiled, until her death in 1923.) That the literary theme can only be decoded by those who know their Synge is a pity.

To date, however, none of the critics who have written about the film has spotted the obvious links: for example, when Lynchehaun reminisces about killing his father the words come straight out of Christy Mahon's mouth.

All of this would have been plainer had Cathal Black been able to shoot the script as written. There, the story begins with Lynchehaun at the opening night of The Playboy, the one man in the rioting audience who is, you might say, enjoying himself.

This is not as unlikely as it seems since in real life, as in the film, Lynchehaun did return from the US to the scene of his crime.

Much less likely was the idea of bringing Synge and Lynchehaun literally face to face at the end - but instead of the playwright's nose being bitten off, he was to get a smacking kiss on the mouth. Unfortunately, none of this curious canoodling made it to the screen. The Film Board, for instance, had reasonable objections to Synge as a character - on the grounds that his presence put the film into "book-ends" (which seemed OK to me) - but there were other backers who didn't see the booking point at all. They wanted to get on with the "love story", and for them the use of the word "vagina" in the crucial courtroom scene was "distasteful", an observation which was followed, with hardly a pause for heavy breathing, by an inquiry as to the chances of seeing Greta Scacchi's "tits" (horrible word).

There was one scene where sight of Scacchi's embonpoint would have been dramatically decent - she is seen clipping an ear-ring on to her nose (don't ask me why, I only wrote it) while she is in the bath. Elaborate and expensive measures had been taken to build a suitably Victorian bathroom, but when the taps were turned on out came water the colour of an Achill bog.

IF Scacchi, who really is a star (bright at a distance, very hot up close), had seen this she wouldn't have got into it - so the bath in the film is full of foam. In the Hollywood cliché, suds stopped you seeing too much of the star; in this case it stopped the star seeing too much of herself.

But what really flattened the froth and put a stop to the Synge spiel - spiel means game and, apart from pointing the finger, the point of the script was its playfullness - was simply a lack of money and time.

Love and Rage was shot in 40 days on Achill Island, in the house where the real-life events happened, and on the Isle of Man. The logistics of this island-hop were horrible. And all the while the money was vanishing like snow off a tambourine.

At the best of times making a film is akin to firing a cruise-missile full of cash at a distant target. In this case, the target was moving and the missile was fired from the shoulder and guided by eye. The collateral damage was enormous, particularly to the German producer, Rudolf Wichmann, without whose commitment nothing would have happened at all.

The desperate speed at which the film was made isn't all that apparent in the end-result. But, for instance, the US Supreme Court is reduced to a voice-over, and the prison escape isn't there at all - Slawomir Idziak (who photographed the classic Three Colours Blue) did shoot some footage with a black cloth and iron bars on the back of a moving van, but that, along with my acting début, as Lynchehaun's child-abusing father, ended up on the cutting-room floor. And I can also remember Cathal Black standing on the set and saying, "You see this, Brian? I can't shoot this". So I borrowed his Biro and in seconds slashed three days of camera set-ups down to one. Now Scacchi returns home after being raped and instead of, as per script, wandering distracted through the house, she compacts all her emotion into a brief walk from front gate to front door. I remember Cathal saying to me, "Greta keeps crying off-screen but I can't get her to do it on camera". Nor does she, but when I see the scene I still get a catch in my throat.

Some of the financial grief caused by Love and Rage has not yet gone away, and that partly explains why the film has been so slow to get to the market place. The main reason, though, is because it has been deemed to be "not commercial". But the same thing was said about Cathal's Korea and the plain people of Ireland, when they got the chance, flocked to it.

Will the public flock to Love and Rage? That remains to be seen, but speaking as a detached observer - being a scriptwriter is a bit like being a sperm donor - I think the film, despite all its troubles and wobbles, is risky as opposed to risqué, tolerably moral, and with some political relevance to a country where not only are the Omagh bombers running around scot-free but the leader of a party, soon perhaps to be in government, says if he knew who they were, he wouldn't shop them to the cops.

From what I have been able to garner from audiences so far, the film makes men uneasy and women queasy, which was also part of the intention, and yet women in particular seem to recognise the way it deals with the dangers of desire. One way or another Love and Rage is not, to quote Lynchehaun, "a soft hand under the hen".

Love and Rage opens in the Irish Film Centre on Friday