Float Like a Butterfly
(Ireland, 101 min.)
Written and directed by Carmel Winters
Starring: Hazel Doupe, Dara Devaney, Johnny Collins, Hilda
Foy
Programme: Discovery (World Premiere)
TIFF throws a crowd-pleasing punch in its line-up of girl
power. Audiences willing to overlook the many boxing movie clichés in Float Like a Butterfly may find an
empowering tale of a young girl’s fight for freedom. Whatever its shortcomings,
Float Like a Butterfly has a lot to
admire in the representational aspects, which inevitably tipped the crowd in
its favour.
The Champ himself would be proud to raise Frances’s fist.
She fights in the memory of her late mother, who died when she was just a
child. A violent encounter with the police rips the family apart at the
beginning of the film and when Butterfly
flashes forward to Frances’s teenage years, the fight inside her is only
stronger as she trains with a stronger sense that her family hails from a
community of marginalized people. Only recently recognized as an ethnic
minority in Ireland, the Irish Travellers are a largely nomadic group in the
1960s period that Float Like a Butterfly dramatizes
and the film shows their ongoing rootlessness as the state and Irish majority
treat them as second-class citizens, if not lower than rats.
The film depicts the Travellers with good spirits as Winters
creates itinerant communities that disperse and gather together to perform for
the crowds. The sense of kinship and community, however, is disrupted when
Frances’s father, Michael (Dara Devaney), returns from prison and insists on
taking his children away from the family they’ve formed with their
grandparents. Frances’s doesn’t go without a fight, especially since the travels
could lead her to Dublin where Muhammed Ali is expected to visit for a
momentous fight.
Winters crafts an affectionate family drama that resonates
with relevant themes of belonging, identity, and gender as Frances finds
herself continually at odds with her father’s sexist attitudes. Being part of a
marginalized community does little to open Michael’s eyes to similar struggles
and social inequities. It’s only once he challenges Frances to give him her
best shot does he realize how upside down his world can be.
Float Like a Butterfly
has an authentic and affectionate eye for Ireland’s poor and working class
citizens. The film is a tale of the rich histories that endure on Ireland’s
rolling hillsides. It’s also about our failures to learn from history as too
many of the themes echo the struggles faces by girls like Frances today. Told without
the euphoria of Once or the giddy
charm of Sing Street, Float Like a Butterfly is stark social
realism, but it’s buoyed by the same musicality that makes the other Irish
ditties so strong. A through line for the film is the power of music as
traditional tunes sung by the Irish Travellers evoke the resilience of a people
who will not be moved. The folk songs are like Frances’s ringwalk anthems as
the spirit of her people echoes in each punch she throws.
Float Like a Butterfly
screens:
-Sat, Sept. 8 at TIFF Lightbox at 2:15 PM
-Mon, Sept. 10 at Cineplex Scotiabank at 7:00 PM
-Fri, Sept. 14 at Cineplex Scotiabank at 3:15 PM