`Irish people come over to New York from these rural communities, and they discover this place where they can be anonymous, where you can walk down Fifth Avenue wearing pink knickers, and nobody's going to ask `who's that?' " It's a long way from the sentimental pieties of traditional Irish Americana to 2by4, Ballyfermot-born, New York-based Jimmy Smallhorne's raw and provocative portrait of Irish emigrants living in the Bronx in the 1990s. Sitting in the foyer of a Galway hotel the morning after the first Irish screening of his film at the Film Fleadh, the hyperactive actor-writer-director, surrounded by friends and family, is still buzzing from the experience.
"Somebody heard two women coming out afterwards saying it was the most disgusting film they'd seen in their lives," he says with some pleasure.
In addition to writing and directing, Smallhorne takes the leading role of Johnny, a young Dubliner working on construction sites for his wheeler-dealer uncle (the late Chris O'Neill). Troubled by disturbing nightmares, Johnny leads the same dislocated, drink and drug-fuelled life as many of his fellow-workers, while exploring new facets of his own sexuality through a relationship with a young Australian. While 2by4 has moments of great delicacy and tenderness, its depiction of the lives led by its protagonists - wracked by guilt, anger and loneliness, their neuroses heightened by alcohol and cocaine - is pretty bleak. The overall sense is of lives spinning out of control and into potential disaster.
"Some tap into it and never come out of it," says Smallhorne. "When you're in this sexualised situation, where desire is glorified, and you're high, you don't know what might happen. There was one fella who used to spend 1,000 dollars a night getting strapped up by a six-foot momma in a crack house in Harlem. The next day he'd be back on the site, and it's all: `How'rya Paddy, are you watching the hurling tonight?' "
He accepts that some may find the film's apparent equation of childhood abuse with adult sexual orientation problematic. "But we showed it at San Francisco to an audience of hundreds of gay men and lesbians, and there wasn't a problem. It's for you to go away and make that connection. When they stripped Matt Talbot, and they found all those chains and stuff, it was the same thing. So it's a sexualisation of Catholicism. I'm not into S&M myself - I think it's about punishment and jubilation, but the stories you'd hear over a cup of tea on the building sites would blow your mind."
Jimmy Smallhorne has been living in America since 1990, when he decided to take up his Donnelly visa. "I sold two U2 tickets for 400 quid, and that paid for the flight. I borrowed another 100 quid and headed off. I was just sick of living here. I wanted to get to New York, I wanted to get laid and become an actor. Dublin was so stifling. When I got there I worked in construction for a couple of years, and sold soda bread in flea markets. Then I got a lucky break - I met a guy on the subway, got a part in a play, and I've been acting ever since."
IN an Irish film-making environment which often seems a bit too bland for its own good, 2by4 is an occasionally flawed but admirably brash and ambitious first outing by a new talent who clearly has a voice of his own. There's certainly no false modesty here - Smallhorne features in almost every scene, as often as not stripped at least to the waist. This, it's clear from the outset, is his film, but he carries it off with some chutzpah. The influences of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes are clear, and there's a fluidity and naturalism to the performances and camerawork (which won Best Cinematography at this year's Sundance Film Festival for cameraman Declan Quinn) which is more reminiscent of the best of American independent cinema than of most recent Irish offerings.
Smallhorne isn't one to disguise his opinions (another refreshing change) and he's typically forthright about Irish film-making. "Irish film tends to be just a camera put in front of an actor reading lines. We didn't have a language for making films. We don't know how to be quiet. The whole cinematic experience is of sound, of lighting, of framing, of design. The actor is the final part of that, but he mustn't get in the way of the rest of it. We know now that 90 per cent of communication is non-verbal, and that's something we have to learn to do."
Unlike another recent Irish movie about the emigrant experience, Gold In The Streets, 2by4 actually feels like the real world in the 1990s. Although drug use and sexual ambiguity are hardly new subjects, it's surprising how tentatively they've been represented in Irish films. "It's about time we were seeing Irish people doing this on screen," says Smallhorne. "This is a more open society than it used to be, but we're still scared to look at things." He's critical of what he sees as the middle-class blandness of Irish film-making. "Less than five per cent of people from working-class areas like Ballyfermot get to further education, and they certainly never get to think of making films, which is a very middle-class thing. There are whole communities of people who aren't represented on film, or if they are, it's by people like Stephen Frears.
"I just know that what I was shooting was real. It's the way it is for many of them in New York. There's loads and loads of these stories. All I wanted to do was show them."
2by4 closes this year's Sixth Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on Monday night. For information and booking for the festival, contact the Irish Film Centre at (01) 6793477.
