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A Hallmark Selchie Tale
The Seventh Stream
written and directed by John Gray
airing on CBS television, December 9, 2001 at 9 p.m. eastern time
Readers who have spent some time at Nimble Spirit may have noticed that we have a taste for the selchie legends of the British Isles (see our reviews of The People of the Sea and The Folk Keeper). These legends, in which seals shed their skins and walk the earth, at least temporarily, as humans, are open to a range of interpretation. A selchie woman, for instance, remains in human form as long as she cannot regain access to her sealskin, and during her time as a human she continually yearns for the sea. If the skin has been hidden away by the man she has come to love, marry, and have children with, is she trapped, by love, prevented from regaining her true self? Is her husband (usually a lonely man) a thief or abuser? And when she finds her skin and returns to the sea, leaving husband and children behind, does being true to her identity amount to abandonment of children and love? Or does the value of “going home” supersede all other values?
Regardless of interpretation, I hear the selchie tales with fascination. They are exotic, even sexy, in the transformation of seal into woman; they are homey and heartfelt as the selchie woman loves, marries, sets up housekeeping, and devotedly raises her children, all the while yearning to find her skin and return to the sea. The tales are exciting, as the selchie recovers her skin (perhaps woven by her husband into the thatch of her seaside cottage or hidden among the rocks of a stone wall); they are heartbreaking as she makes the choice to return to the sea, and cathartic as the man and children left ashore cope with their loss. And ultimately the heart is warmed once more as the selchie provides for her human family from her home in the sea, and the man vows to never again kill a seal.
John Sayles’ film The Secret of Roan Inish is a beautiful and evocative selchie tale set in Ireland in the middle of the twentieth century. Fiona, a young girl living with her grandparents on the Irish coast, wants to return to the island of her birth, Roan Inish -- “island of the seals” -- convinced she will find her little brother Jamie years after he, in his cradle, drifted out to sea with the tide. It is a tale loss and recovery, of homecoming and discovery of one’s roots among both the human and natural communities. In Sayles’ capable hands the story is relatively plain and understated. Roan Inish is family-friendly and, for me, has had intense staying power since I saw it soon after its release in 1995.
A new, original production from the Hallmark Hall of Fame, which premieres on CBS on December 9, 2001, also draws on the selchie legends of Ireland. The Seventh Stream, written and directed by John Gray, braids selchie lore, a love story, and a dark strand of cruelty and need into a presentation that will expose perhaps millions of viewers to selchies and their legends. While ultimately not as satisfying as Roan Inish, Gray’s script and production succeed in engendering in the viewer a sense of wonder at the expanse and potential of the human heart and spirit even in the context of our own losses and propensities toward violence.
The Seventh Stream is set in 1909. Quinn, a lonely widower and fisherman, has been alone since his wife was lost at sea five years earlier. He fishes each day with his older partner, Willy, and an apprentice named Dunhill. Dunhill captures a selchie maid, conceals her sealskin, and abruptly ends his apprenticeship with Quinn -- with the selchie in his curragh, Dunhill catches all the fish he needs, and then some. But he treats her cruelly, and when Quinn gets wind of what is going on he undertakes to remove the woman from Dunhill’s “possession.”
Quinn gives the selchie the name Mairead, and the two inevitably fall in love. Still, though, her desire to return to her home in the sea is strong. Just as Quinn’s wife was lost at sea, Mairead observes, she herself is “lost on land.” But in loving her, Quinn begins to regain his own sense of self, even as his conflict with Dunhill grows larger and threatens his happiness. In the end, Quinn must choose between holding on to Mairead and letting her go: Will it be by staying, or by leaving, that Mairead will enable two souls to become once again whole?
Despite the satisfactions it gives, The Seventh Stream is marred by occasional platitudes with which Mairead, in all her innocent newness as a human being, somehow manages to voice the wisdom of the ages about the human soul. As Mairead, Saffron Burrows exudes a mysterious beauty that is sometimes overcome by this need to make of her a wisdom woman. Scott Glenn, as Quinn, is suitably wizened and sotto voce as he emerges from five years of internal exile after the loss of his wife, but he does not have enough opportunity to display the fisherman’s multiple dimensions.
In the end, the character who most leaves his mark on the viewer is Dunhill, the unhappy, cruel, needy man who uses the selchie woman for mere personal gain and seems to be immune to the possibility of love. As Dunhill, John Lynch seems to know he is trapped within his own defects of character and has not a clue as to how to escape. He is the film’s most interesting and sympathetic character, a villain who could be set free of his flaws by just a little self-knowledge -- knowledge we begin to hope he will gain. I found myself wishing that writer/director Gray had made more of the role of Dunhill, and grateful to actor Lynch for making so much of him; as a character who lives in both shadow and light he adds the blessing of ambiguity to some otherwise “pat” characters and circumstances. (Lynch, coincidentally, was also featured in The Secret of Roan Inish.)
Although it is not quite on a par with Roan Inish, Hallmark Hall of Fame’s The Seventh Stream provides a good introduction to the selchie legends and offers warm insights about the human heart and soul. It can be hoped that younger viewers might watch this film and give in to magic and enchantment of a different sort than they will find in the fantasy worlds at the cineplex, and perhaps be motivated to delve into the lore that is the source of this story.
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