Bloom
Director: Sean Walsh
Actors: Alvaro Lucchesi, Eoin McCarthy, Neili Conroy, Angeline Ball, Hugh O'Connor
Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001
Running time: 113 minutes
Almost a decade in the making, Sean Walsh's Bloom is a full-blooded, adaptation of James Joyce's seminal novel, Ulysses.
Describing the plot of Ulysses is about as easy as playing pool blindfolded up a staircase, but essentially it follows Leopold Bloom (Stephen Rea), his wife Molly (Angeline Ball) and the wildly sensitive young poet Stephen Dedalus (Hugh O'Connor) over the course of an apparently normal day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin.
It's patently obvious that Bloom isn't for everyone - to say the narrative is unconventional in cinematic terms is one of the great understatements. Moreover, some of the devices Walsh employs - imaginative as they are - simply don't work and leave the viewer cold. But you certainly can't fault the scope of Walsh's ambition and the fact that he doesn't ever become bogged down in Joyce's dense prose. Respectful without ever being over reverential, he manages to distil some of the themes that rush through Joyce's text quite brilliantly, specifically the rampant sexuality coursing through the story. Elsewhere, unfortunately, Bloom often feels a little uneven, and rather confusing, lacking a fulcrum upon which to work off its myriad of ideas. Then again, some of us would say that about the book too.
