Tangled up in green

Kisses 2008 Ireland/Sweden (78 minutes) written and directed by Lance Daly.

An eleven-year-old boy regularly beaten by his father and his next-door neighbor, an eight-year-old sexually abused by her uncle, flee their desolate suburban neighborhood to go to Dublin on Christmas Eve.

Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) throws a ladder up to the second floor window of the bathroom where Dylan (Shane Curry), who has just intervened in one of his parents’ fights, has locked himself in and has his angry father (Paul Roe) breaking through the door.

Dylan gets out the window in the nick of time and the ladder comes crashing down with him on it. The children are unhurt and make a clean getaway from their ‘kips,’ but where do they go?

On the other side of a field crossed with high power lines is a canal. Kylie jumps on a passing dredger before the captain (David Bendito) realizes this little girl can do so; soon he has both children on board, headed for Dublin with him. When Dylan tells the captain his name, the captain pulls out a harmonica and plays and sings Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm—which fades to the original track. He tells Dylan that his ‘namesake’ is ‘a musical god.’

As the children bond with the captain, color begins to filter through what had been black and white. The captain lets the children off in full color Dublin, ostensibly to find Dylan’s older brother, Barry, who ran away from home to Dublin two years before also because their father beat him. Dylan thinks that Barry squats in a house on Gardiner Street.

But first Kylie, who resembles the little Drew Barrymore, uses money she found hidden at home that morning to buy them both jackets and ‘wheelie’ sneakers with lights and wheels in the heels, and they scamper happily dodging adults through a brightly colored mall, then up and down O’Connell Street and along quays on the Liffey River on their ‘wheelies’.

Along the way, they meet and spend time with an eccentric busker (José Jimenez) who plays Bob Dylan’s music. They zip off to Gardiner Street in central Dublin to knock on doors looking for Barry. People know of Barry, but no one knows where he is. When Dylan asks a woman outside the squat flat (Elizabeth Fuh) why she just kissed an older man, she sits down next to Dylan and tells him that the man is kind.

‘I can give nothing to him, only kisses. When you kiss, you give or take,’ she says, kissing Dylan on the cheek. ‘See. For you, I give you luck.’

Dylan and Kylie’s luck involves coming face to face with Bob Dylan himself—an Australian impersonator (Adrian Kennedy) taking a smoke break from his show—and a narrow escape from the Sackman—a fairy tale bogeyman who in the flesh turns out to be a child molester and his accomplice. The children find a close trusting bond in helping each other in the course of their escapades.

MP would have loved this picture when we were the age of its protagonists and imagines that most kids and adults also should enjoy it. The story is well made and well written for these two appealing child actors, although their salty tongues—they only repeat what they hear adults and their older siblings and peers say—and some of the things to which they are exposed are several cries beyond the Disney lot.