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Director's Statement
Imagine a typical scene from a Laurel and Hardy film. Stan and 0llie are lost, hungry and in some sort of trouble. They stand, childlike, bemused, out of touch with reality in the proscenium arch of a simple two-shot. When they speak, it's with a certain deliberate, presented quality; the lines are given space and the meaning of their actions is always crystal clear. Transpose this to Dublin in 2003, transform Laurel and Hardy into two junkies teetering on the brink of extinction, and you have some sense of the dark, but comedic style of ADAM AND PAUL. The two heroes are more than individuals they're archetypes; the scenes are not slices of real life but funny, schematic studies. There is a naive formality and uninflected blockiness in the drama and something very pure about the subtly stylized, carefully scored dialogue. All this, combined with the deliberateness with which new characters are brought onto the stage, the ritualised hellos and good-byes, and so on, give the film its unique stylistic signature.
People are so familiar with the standard, naturalistic approach to the kind of material dealt with in ADAM AND PAUL that its edge has been dulled. The real power of this film is that it allows us to slip characters like Adam and Paul under the audience's radar and creates a real possibility of empathy and pathos, without easy sentiment or standard, dramatic manipulation.