See the Sea

Settling in with a cup of tea, surrendering to beaches with high rocky ledges, meadows, a young mother a baby on one hip, lazing through summer days. It is the perfect beginning to a film, a story - only, in this case, not a perfect story.

The first glimpses of Sasha and Siofra's lives in See the Sea are a pebbly beach through clear shallow waves with foamy edges, thick green meadow grasses holding gently in stiff coastal breezes and a solitary whitewashed, concrete house with royal blue shuttered windows and doors. A baby cries and a mother calls a sleepy answer from bed, and in her husband's white t-shirt, walks to a playpen and leans down for her sweet baby.

The part of 10 month old Siofra is played flawlessly by a sweet babe who cries when Mommy leaves, quiets when Mommy comes, sleeps on the beach under a hat and a thin blanket or snuggled beside Mommy on the couch. Her tiny toes are teased by the surf as she walks, holding Mommy's hands, in the wet sand.

Sasha, Siofra's mother, is a pleasant young woman with the bright, callow face of an adolescent boy and shoulder length straight honey colored hair. She fixes the whining baby a bottle, cleans a naked Siofra's bottom in the sunny grass, she rides Siofra down the empty road to the beach on a bike laden with towels, a bucket. Any mother can remember those peculiar days of young motherhood, a mixture of precious simple moments, mild weary frustrations, gazing loneliness, profound and mysterious love.

Sasha falls asleep on her towel, Siofra wobbles to stand using her mother's behind as a prop. Her eyes climb the rock rising before her where a backpacker walks and stops to look out over the sea and then down to the solitary pair on the beach below her.

We meet the backpacker. She stakes her red tent in Sasha's backyard. They share meals and odd conversations. Her manner is rather flat, raw, unfriendly - rude even. Sasha doesn't seem to notice as she willingly, perhaps because of the sweet dullness of her days, lets this strange visitor into her life. We learn that Sasha's husband is coming home soon from business but in the meantime we are helplessly beached with these three people in the whitewashed house by the sea.