Kisses

There’s a tough, empathetic study of hardscrabble living and adolescent connection rattling around somewhere in Kisses, Lance Daly’s wispy tale of two Irish pre-teens on the run from their abusive rural households. You can catch a glimpse of it now and then, in a stray glance or tentative exchange between introverted Dylan (Shane Curry) and self-possessed Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) as they make their way through the streets of nighttime Dublin: a tender understanding that their friendship rests not only upon mutual affection, but a sorrowful shared understanding of what it’s like to live in a house that is far from a home. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, whose music pops up throughout the film, each is the other’s shelter from the storm.

Yet Kisses seems perennially held in a one-step-forward, two-steps-back pattern, in which a moment of clear-eyed truth gets quickly blotted out by egregious cutesy-poo montages, misbegotten stabs at “harsh” realism, and unseemly emotional button-pushing. The troubles start early, with Dylan and Kylie’s respective families drawn in the broadest of “bad parent” strokes. We first see Dylan’s father (Paul Roe), a wrathful drunk, pawing at an uncooperative toaster before hurling it out of the kitchen in a fit of rage. Kylie’s bitter mom (Cathy Malone), meanwhile, obliviously forces Kylie to give her leering uncle (Sean McDonagh) a kiss on the cheek. Life outside the house isn’t much better, with both kids teased by neighborhood bullies under a perennially gray Irish sky. Daly lays it all on pretty thick, leaving little room for such matters as how the film’s lower-middle-class milieu might have led to this bubbling cauldron of anger and abuse. Lacking these nuances, the film’s portrayal of domestic violence begins to feel more than a little facile.

One can argue, of course, that Kisses is primarily a film about how life looks through a child’s eyes, when the world of adult issues seems like a scary and unknowable place. Yet we barely have time to digest this idea either. Once Kylie and Dylan run away to Dublin in the hopes of staying with Dylan’s elder brother (who fled the home some two years previous), the film awkwardly shifts gears, foregoing sub-Mike Leigh grittiness for lightweight adventures in the city: a mall shopping spree; a ride into Dublin with a Dylan-spouting boat captain. Daly captures these antics in a string of middling montages, scored to either Dylan’s tunes or a twinkly score by Go Blimps Go, that section them off a little too neatly from the earlier scenes of household trauma. They feel less like an act of escape on the part of the characters than an inelegant directorial change-up, even if some of the details ring true (their big mall purchase: Heelies).

Such swerving from the charmingly low-key to the jarringly off-key defines Kisses, particularly in an ill-conceived juxtaposition in which a mildly amusing encounter with an Australian Bob Dylan impersonator (Stephen Rea, because why not?) is followed by a beyond-tacky child-abduction plot twist. Daly’s choices sometimes feel so wrongheaded (he wrote the screenplay as well) that it makes you question the legitimacy of any emotional investment at all. And that’s a shame, because the best moments in Kisses show that, if nothing else, Daly has a knack for getting subtle, affecting work from his lead actors. Curry and O’Neill possess an appealing rapport with one another, and each conveys their respective characters’ psychic wounds with little grandstanding. They draw us into their private universe of games and jokes, and Daly’s filmmaking is at its finest when he underlines just how lovely and fragile that world is (an aerial shot of the two laying peacefully on an ice-skating rink has a particular last-two-kids-on-earth poignancy).

These moments, alas, cannot ultimately save a film continuously hobbled by its own unsure vision and questionable narrative choices. It haunts Kisses up to its closing moments. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that the film’s final scene provides a particularly moving manifestation of just how desperately Dylan and Kylie need one another in the face of life’s cruelties (indeed, a better film might have got them out of their city misadventures sooner and explored how adolescent co-dependence works day-to-day in abusive households). But just when you are ready to forgive some of Daly’s missteps and salute these last images, Kylie blows Dylan a kiss: a moment that Daly inexplicably underlines with tacky chimes tinkling on the score. It’s a dunderheaded choice: as if she’s blowing fairy dust, rather than throwing out a lifeline, one drowning soul to another.

                                            Matt Connolly