FILM REVIEW The Runway

Jamie Kearns (left) and DemiΡn Bichir star in Ian Power’s debut ‘The Runway’.

All set for take-off in a small village

Cinema

Daniel Carey

“WE’RE building an airport,” Monsignor James Horan told Jim Fahy of RTÉ News in 1981. “And I hope the Department of Transport doesn’t hear about it. Now don’t tell them … We’ve no money, but we’re hoping to get it next week, or the week after.”

The story of Knock Airport (or Ireland West Airport Knock, to give it its up-to-date title) has not yet been told on the big screen, though it is the subject of a musical as well as Terry Reilly’s book. The real-life events which inspired ‘The Runway’, Ian Power’s debut feature film, also happened in the early 1980s, and also centres on an aviation theme.

On April 18, 1983, Captain Ruben Ocana made an emergency landing at Mallow racecourse after the Mexican Gulfstream private jet he was flying from New York to Munich ran out of fuel. While the 15 passengers headed for Shannon, Ocana stayed with the plane, and a temporary tarmacadam runway of almost 3,000 feet was laid to enable the aircraft to leave five weeks later.

Writer/director Power saw the event marked in the RTÉ TV programme ‘Reeling In The Years’, and built a story very loosely based on it. Set in the fictional Cork village of Dromoleen, it tells a charming coming-of-age tale.

Paco (Jamie Kearns) is a nine-year-old who spends his days getting into scrapes with his Traveller friend Frogs (John Carpenter) and his nights listening to Spanish-language tapes. His mother Grace (Kerry Condon) works long hours and he believes that his long-gone father is in Spain. “Nothing ever happens around here,” one character mused early on, but something fairly dramatic happens as a plan crashes in a bog nearby. Paco is first on the scene and, using his elementary Spanish, acts as a dubious translator between the Colombian pilot Ernesto (DemiΡn Bichir) and the locals.

A plan to fix the plane and build a runway is developed by the unashamedly small-town councillor Tommy Carmody (Donncha Crowley, in splendid form) and the garda (Pat Laffan, who played Georgie Burgess in ‘The Snapper’ and Pat Mustard in ‘Father Ted’). Unemployed aluminium fabricators are deployed to do the repair work – and barred from the local pub until they finish the job.

‘The Runway’ clearly carries echoes of Steven Spielberg’s ‘ET’, which aired a year before the events in Mallow. Paco hides Ernesto in his bedroom for a night, and all the mysterious visitor from the sky wants is to use the phone. “I’m keeping him,” the young boy tells his mother indignantly.

There are funny set-pieces. Ernesto risks the wrath of prize bull Kojak to retrieve the plane’s landing gear, and finds himself fending off chatty locals in the pub, asking things like: “Did ya ever see ‘Dallas’?” Carmody sets up a meeting with the IRA to secure aviation fuel, and claims the Colombian is related to Che Guevara. A local Traveller family agrees to supply tarmacadam for the runway in exchange for a right of residence – and a table-tennis table.

‘The Runway’ is far from perfect. Some of the subplots work much better than others. Much of the story is contrived. The Traveller characters’ dialogue is – controversially – subtitled. The pilot’s back-story is never fully explained, and the motivation of some characters is hard to make sense of.

But there’s plenty to like here too. There’s good chemistry between the boy and the pilot, and PJ Dillon’s old camera lenses capture the look of a bygone era. As someone who was born in the early 1980s, suddenly I feel old.

Rating 6 out of 10