Imogen Poots as Rose Dugdale, Lewis Brophy as Martin, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Dominic in Baltimore (2023)
The Future Tense (2022), the most recent film by the Irish directing duo Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy (aka the ‘Desperate Optimists), could be thought of as an ‘unconstructed biopic’ about Rose Dugdale, a British heiress to extreme privilege who joined a rogue faction of the IRA, and in 1974, led one of the biggest art heists in history. The Future Tense saw the directors scouting locations for a film about Dugdale, sharing parts of her unbelievable story, while simultaneously searching for a new home in Ireland after many years in London. Stuck between two places, two selves, the details of Dugdale’s life offered a throughline in their personal, fragmented rumination on national identity as they wondered: “What got into her bloodstream?”
Those familiar with the Optimists’ work won’t be surprised to learn that the ‘constructed’ version of their film about Dugdale, Baltimore, is not really a biopic. You could call it a ‘character-driven heist movie’, a moody triptych that leaps freely between timelines. In one of these, the young Dugdale (played with a cool affect by Imogen Poots) is off to study at Oxford, where she will read Wittgenstein, find feminism, embrace revolutionary politics. The second follows the heist, in which Dugdale and her IRA comrades steal 19 paintings from Russborough House in Co. Wicklow as a ransom for the repatriation of imprisoned IRA members Dolours and Marian Price. The third part of the triptych shows the paranoia-spiked hideout in a Cork cottage, watched over by Goya, Vermeer, Rubens.
Baltimore isn’t out to present the facts, but to ask: why would an upper-class woman from Devon join the Irish republican cause? If it’s not national identity, from what other soils can those seeds of radicalisation grow?
Lying face down on the floor of Russborough House in a red wig, mid-heist (and looking not unlike Heath Ledger’s Joker), Dugdale revisits memories that gesture towards an answer: the sadness at being forced to hunt as a child (“Poor fox”); the humiliation of being asked to curtsy for the Queen as a debutante. Such unease with her class eventually turned to disgust – an inescapable feeling that ‘We are the baddies’. Watching news footage of Bloody Sunday – the day in 1972 when 13 Derry civilians were slaughtered by British paratroopers – is shown here as a crystallising moment for Dugdale, the point when righteous anger turned to militant action.
That none of this fragmentation sidelines the heist shows the skill in Lawlor and Molloy’s nimble storytelling. Dugdale – who uses a dodgy French accent to trick the “Capitaleest peeeigs” and gain entry to Russborough – is frequently shot from the perspective of a terrified little boy who happens to be in the house, a device that amps up the tension and muddies audience loyalties. Nerves are kept on edge by composer Stephen McKeon’s urgent squall of snares and timpanis, but nothing feels rushed – time is taken to sketch out Dugdale’s IRA comrades on the job: old hand dissident Dominic (a sage, scene-stealing Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), and the rookie Martin (Lewis Brophy), a loose cannon.
Every fumbling, violent action is handsomely shot. Filmed in Cinemascope, Baltimore’s shots often have the feel of a triptych painting (an image of the bloody, bound house-owner has a touch of Rubens). And the camera is allowed to linger on the stolen artworks (in particular Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, a slightly blunt vehicle for conversations about class divide) before they’re bundled into a Triumph saloon.
Much of the film plays out post-heist in the cottage in West Cork where they smoke, strategise and stack priceless paintings on coffee tables. They talk of a safe house in the nearby village of Baltimore – which gives the film its title – that we sense they will never reach. Dugdale (who we know by now is pregnant) wants to prove herself to her comrades, but you also detect a sense of superiority in her eagerness to educate them about the art they have just liberated.
It’s a waiting game until this false sanctuary implodes, and Lawlor and Molloy help us buy into the setting with careful attention to tiny details – a picture of Pope Paul VI on the cottage wall, a shelf of Odlums porridge oats behind the counter at the village shop where the owner treats Dugdale with suspicion. And when she bumps into Donal (Dermot Crowley) – a local farmer whose friendliness means he discovers too much – Dugdale whispers, “Slán go fóill” (‘Goodbye for now’), a hint that he is now a situation she must deal with.
Having the heist as the film’s connecting thread means there’s a lot about Dugdale we don’t learn – for example, that months before she had tried (and failed) to blow up a Royal Ulster Constabulary station. But the Desperate Optimists have faith in their audience, and do not hedge their bets. They don’t lionise Dugdale, but nor do they impose a judgement on her crimes. Rose Dugdale died on 18 March, the week of Baltimore’s official release, and the facts of her life are as enigmatic – and cinematic – as Lawlor and Molloy’s non-biopic. We know now what got into her bloodstream, but what’s in the heart is always out of reach.
► Baltimore is in UK cinemas now.