Love and Rage

Ireland at the end of the 19th century - a time of political unrest. Agnes MacDonnell is the owner of a large estate on an island off the coast of North West Ireland. She is a strong and self-confident Englishwoman and finds her male counterpart in the strong-willed James Lynchehaun who persuades her against her intuition to employ him as her estate manager. In spite of the great differences in class and age - she is in her early forties, he is in his twenties - Agnes feels herself magically attracted to Lynchehaun. This is the beginning of a passionate, but dangerous affair. For, gradually, Lynchehaun's fiendish character comes to the surface. Love & Rage depicts a world of Victorian melodrama where an emancipated woman wages a desperate and, at times, comical struggle for power and dominance with a charismatic, but destructive man.

Comments from the director Cathal Black

"On the sixth of October 1894 there was done in the island of Achill an act that, though not by reason of restraint on the part of the perpetrator, fell a hair's breadth short of murder."

This is the first sentence in the late Professor James Carney's book 'The Playboy and the Yellow Lady' on which Love and Rage is loosely based. In that year, James Lynchehaun savagely attacked Agnes McDonnell, an English land owner and set fire to her house; he escaped from Portlaoise Prison to America where Irish Americans hailed him as a hero and the US Supreme Court refused to extradite him back to Ireland on the grounds that his crime was a political one. At a time when relations between Ireland and Britain are still problematic, it is obvious that such a story is still relevant.

On the other hand, this is not a political tract. In some respects, it deliberately goes against the grain - this is not what Ireland is supposed to be like, at least in the cinema. Apart from the way it reverses expectations, another thing that attracted me to Brian Lynch's script was it allowed me to examine what can happen when a fiercely independent woman is sexually attracted to a dangerous man, a notion which is part of the dynamic of so called romantic love. I'd like to think that Love and Rage is, in the best sense, a woman's film.

Notes