Christy: That Barbershop Feeling

When I was 11, I got my first professional haircut at a barber in my village. It was a little place in a small building that also housed a furniture store and a charity shop. Nice, and snug, and homely, once you’re used to it, and not frightened of your own shadow as an 11-year-old is. I walked in with my parents, sat down, and the barber asked me what I wanted - that was new. What did I want? I looked back at my parents, my dad shrugged, and asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know, so I just asked for the only haircut I knew, and the one I’d been getting my entire life: ‘Buzz cut, please mate,’ I probably said, maybe without the mate. Definitely without the mate. Then my parents sat there and watched a stranger give me a haircut. They were about to pay him £10 for that; they could’ve done it for free in the kitchen at home in a quarter of the time. ‘Cheers,’ I probably exclaimed, grinning ear to ear, feeling like an adult for one of the first times in my life, and I probably ran out to play Pokémon Black back at home, or whatever was happening in 2013.

That feeling of a village barbershop on a Thursday afternoon is something so intangibly working-class, the exact type of feeling most social realist dramas yearn to reach for. The calloused knuckles of a man just off the site. The screams of kids running past when school is out. The smell of a chippy rolls in through the window. It's all located in that little box where people get their haircut, and waffle on and on about a thing or two or a who-knows-what's it about a something or other that's forgotten in a week. It's a beautiful place, and for Christy in 'Christy', Brendan Canty's feature-length debut and extension of his 2019 short of the same name, it's his home, the only place he feels safe. That's probably because he was born with magical hair-cutting skills.

Christy (Danny Power) is a bit of a nuisance. Ever since his mum died, he’s been bouncing between different foster homes. He gets into fights, he drinks, he smokes; there’s something inside that he’s trying to run from. Now, nearly 18 and kicked out of his last foster home, he moves in with his half-brother, Shane (Diarmuid Noyes), his wife, Stacey (Emma Willis), and their newborn baby. Obviously, it’s a temporary arrangement, but as Christy finally settles down, makes friends, and becomes a valued member of the community, the question becomes whether it shouldn’t become permanent.

Sadly, for a movie named after its lead, Canty never really builds an interiority into Christy, or even tries to work out where this lashing rage comes from. There are vague swipes at ‘anger towards the system’, or ‘anger at not fitting in’, or ‘anger at the death of his mother’, though nothing concrete. The occasional flashback scene to when he was a child gives a loose framework upon which the melodrama can sit. It’s a little amorphous, which could work if the focus on the community of it all was more filled out, but it’s not either, and with a pretty flat-faced, blank performance from Danny Power, the film is asking an audience to bring too much of their leverage to plonk onto him.

That sense of community, though not made the primary focus, has such a strong sway over the movie, and pitches a tent when it would otherwise fall through. Look at the tender, blossoming relationship between Christy and a local girl, which starts with her signing him up for a raffle for some Strongbow and never actually announces itself as a romance. There’s just the slight looks, the occasional touch, and it’s the kind of levity and softness that is only available with a crew and community that know each other outside the bounds of production. Or the beautifully cringey rapping by a bunch of kids in the cast at random points, culminating in a treacly music video at the end that acts as a perfect exclamation point to the whole endeavour.

The first half is really quite excellent, Christy and Shane butting heads, fighting, running away from actual discussions with each other. It's grounded, down-to-earth stuff. For some reason, Canty then introduces another side to the family, a bunch of Irish mobsters, and a cut-and-dry 'don't let Christy get sucked into this life' replaces the genuine hardship of the situation. These characters are stock, plug-and-play gangsters that fight shirtless in their garden, make women uncomfortable, and traffic in drugs. There's no room for discussion with them; they have to go, and they take up so much of the film, dragging it down from its highs. The one great masterstroke of the movie, the suggestion that Christy being homeless with this lovely woman who's like him wouldn't be the worst result, is thrown out and replaced with these men, which makes it all the more frustrating.

So plays Christy, a wonderfully saccharine slice of Cork that overplays its hand a touch, but so often reminds me what it’s like to sit with people who know and love each other. Even with all of its sloppiness, it has moments that grasp the working-class experience with a love that reminded me of Andrea Arnold’s Bird last year. Recommended.