How It’s New York: Screened at NYU’s Cantor Film Center, Jumpmade its U.S. debut as part of a four-day festival of Irish features, Irish Film New York. And, some of the characters in Jump curse American style, with one woman calling another “a d***” for example.
How It’s Irish: It’s set in Derry city.
Orla O’Sullivan attended Irish Film New York last week, and fills us in on the screening of Jump. It’s a ticking clock of a film, Orla found, and an action-packed story.
Orla O’Sullivan attended Irish Film New York last week, and fills us in on the screening of Jump. It’s a ticking clock of a film, Orla found, and an action-packed story.
Jump got the screenings off to a hopping start. The unusual opening credits, in which film participants’ names emerge from numbers, counting down at stock-ticker speed, set the pace.
And, while you mightn’t wholly approve of some of the events and many coincidences, it’s as if you’ve been kidnapped by joyriders and enjoy the thrilling ride, despite yourself.
Jump opens on Derry’s Peace Bridge on New Year’s Eve—“a big countdown to nothin’,” according to Greta, the central character who has no peace and plans to jump.
And so the countdown begins on an action-packed night that sees violence, drugs, robbery, love and death before dawn.
Through a series of coincidences—not so contrived to those who are Irish born and know that six degrees of separation in the U.S. is three, at most, in Ireland—Greta (Nichola Burley) connects with Pearse (Martin McCann) through her drug-chieftan father Frank Feeney (Lalor Roddy). Greta’s self-professed problem is that she cannot feel; Pearse feels so strongly he is willing to risk his life.
Yes, their love at first sight is more Hollywood than Derry, but they are operating in extreme circumstances and you are happy to be swept along.
More troubling is when Jump later veers into an accident scene and a kind of Pulp Fiction callousness, including gangsters so amusing we lose sight of their barbarity. Just in the nick, it finds its moral compass.
More detail on the plot and we’d have to kill you. (watch the trailer below!)
One standout: Roddy’s performance in the scene where crime boss Feeney is eating while interrogating his employees about a suspected inside job. The degree of menace he conveys while cleaning his teeth with a fork make you very nervous of that fork…
Jump was one of six critically acclaimed and recently made movies shown. Niall McKay, executive director of Irish Film New York, spoke before the screeing at a reception in Glucksman Ireland House, the festival’s co-presenter. After the screening there was a Q&A with Kieron J. Walsh, Jump’s director and co-screenwriter of the script, based on a play by Lisa McGee.
