I didn’t like it.
The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart is a film made by Aidan O’Rourke, Mark Cousins and Becky Manson about the area known as Little Ireland in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and its cultural and musical legacy. I admit to a bit of trepidation going in, because I’d loved Iorram with Aidan O’Rourke’s beautiful score, but I’d been less enthused by Mark Cousins’s The Story of Looking, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that combo was gonna be like in this film.
I actually was really pleased at the start of the film. Aidan reflects on the impact of the Covid lockdowns in a positive way, as a shared cultural experience, that forced us to slow down and stay put, gave us time for thought and internal recalibration, as well as connection with our neighbours and surroundings. His neighbourhood in the centre of the city was usually an anonymous place, stacks of flats one on top of another, the majority let out through Air BnB, and a constant shuffle of tourists. No one connected with their neighbours because there were no neighbours, it was as impersonal as a bustling train station. Over the course of lockdown, with the tourists gone, Aidan connected with three elderly residents, who had lived there from the time of it being Little Ireland, filled with immigrants from Ireland, Lithuania, and Italy. All called Margaret, they shared with him their memories of the neighbourhood. Great, I thought. Sounds brilliant. A sort of ethnography of neighbourhood.
But the Margarets are given barely a few minutes’ space, and then their voices are then largely absent throughout the rest of the film. Instead it focuses on Aidan and his mates in the folk music scene, talking about what folk music means to them. And the whole thing sinks into being very self-indulgent.
In fact I felt I learnt very little about the area or the Margarets, and instead was just treated to a succession of interviews by musicians about themselves. While I’d been totally up for having musical heritage being a large strand of the film, and in fact was something I was looking forward to after Aidan’s Iorram score, it became disproportionately the focus, obscuring the context it was meant to be taking place in.
Also, I absolutely hated the way a lot of this was shot. Constant close-ups of folk’s left nostril, earlobe or eyebrow hairs, while an interview was going on. Each time jittery or swaying out of focus. I understand that there was maybe an attempt to pair the soliloquising on the transcendental nature of music with a dreamy visual meditation on the curls in someone’s hair. But it just totally fought your ability to listen and focus on what was being said, or have the emotion conveyed, when you seemed to be viewing it through the short attention span of a director who seemed now to be counting the freckles on someone’s face, or pondering the beard scruff on someone’s cheek. It actively fought the content. And as time went on, it became infuriating. I ended up shutting my eyes a lot of the time so I could listen to what was being said, instead of being taken on a shuddering ghost train ride around the pores of someone’s face. I think you’ll agree that’s not ideal for a film.
So in the end, despite liking the music it contained, I’ve got to say I didn’t like The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart. I feel it lost its grounding, lost its focus, and became far too centred on the filmmaker.