[In the following review, Kemp praises The Secret of Roan Inish as a charming story with strong cast performances.]

[The setting for The Secret of Roan Inish is] Ireland, the 40s. Ten-year-old Fiona Coneelly's mother is dead and her father, who works in the city, can no longer cope with looking after her. He sends her to live with her grandparents, Hugh and Tess Coneelly, on the coast of Donegal. Hugh points out to Fiona the now-abandoned off-shore island of Roan Inish, where all the Coneellys used to live, and tells her how his great-grandfather, Sean Michael, was shipwrecked but saved by a seal, who bore him to the island. That night Fiona sees a light on Roan Inish.

Hugh reminds Fiona how, on the day of the evacuation, her baby brother Jamie was washed out to sea in his wooden cradle and lost, and warns her not to mention it to Tess. Fiona's young cousin Eamon, who intends to move back to Roan Inish when he grows up, tells her there are rumours of Jamie being sighted. Fiona persuades Hugh and Eamon to take her to the island when they go fishing. She finds warm ashes in a cottage, and small bare footprints on the beach. Later she meets another cousin, Tadhg, said to be “touched”, who tells her that generations ago Liam Coneelly took as his bride a beautiful selkie (half-woman, half-seal) and had many children with her; but one day she found her seal-skin that he had hidden, resumed seal-form and returned for ever to the sea.

Fiona talks Eamon into taking her to Roan Inish again. She catches sight of Jamie, but he runs away and escapes to sea in his cradle-boat. Returning home, she finds Hugh and Tess in despair; their landlord has given them notice to quit. On a foggy day Fiona finds herself mysteriously carried to Roan Inish in an oarless rowing-boat, seemingly propelled by the seals. Once again she sees Jamie and he flees, but she guesses that the seals want her family to move back to the island. Rescued by Hugh and Eamon, she broaches the idea; Hugh is tempted, but Tess remains scornful.

Secretly, Fiona and Eamon set about refurbishing the cottages on Roan Inish. One evening, with a storm brewing, Fiona blurts out to her grandparents that she has seen Jamie. To everyone's surprise, Tess believes her and calmly prepares for the whole family to sail to the island. Once there, they settle in and as the storm clears Jamie appears in his cradle. He tries to flee again, but three seals gently drive him up the beach to his family, and he is reunited with them.

At first sight, John Sayles' first non-American film looks like an odd choice for such a fiercely political film-maker: a gentle piece of Celtic myth-making whose message is the essentially conservative doctrine of getting back to your roots. But Sayles has never been doctrinaire, and running through much of his work has been a parallel but not necessarily contradictory strain, a concern with people trying to gain (or regain) control of their lives, often by coming to terms with who they are and where they started out from. Seen in this light, The Secret of Roan Inish takes up elements of Return of the Secaucus Seven, Baby It's You and Matewan and follows on from Passion Fish, whose paraplegic heroine finds strength in returning to her native Louisiana bayous.

Sayles' films also display an acute sense of place and the Donegal coast is a gift to any visual artist. Haskell Wexler's photography captures the moist, shimmering light of the region, but we also get the texture of it: the drag of oars through seaweed clogged shallows, the fudgy chunkiness of dug peat. Sayles may be creating myth, but he's intent on rooting it in the fabric of actuality. Thus he avoids the windy portentousness of Mike Newell's exploration of mythical Irishry, Into the West.

The myth, too, works both on its own level—as an emanation of natural forces, of wind and water, seals and seagulls—and as a metaphor for social reality. The mixed ancestry of the Coneellys, half-human and half sea-creature, reflects their uneasy status on the western shoreline, in sight of their old home yet sundered from it. They may claim hopefully that, “The East is our future, the West is our past,” but neither seems to offer refuge. To Tess, the city is, “Nothing but noise and dirt and people that's lost their senses,” yet the island is, “nothing for us but sad memories.” The dilemma's side-stepped rather than resolved by the film's ending: the cosy image of the family back in their old home, reunited around the recovered child, leaves out of account the pressures that drove them to quit the island in the first place. (To say nothing of the marginalised father, drunken and isolated in the big city.)

If The Secret of Roan Inish fails to come to grips with its own social implications, against that can be set an abundance of unforced charm and a sheer delight in story-telling. The film is a pleasure to look at and listen to, graced with a lilting, folk-based music score from Mason Daring. Sayles, always known as an actors' director, draws strong, sinewy performances from his cast—not least from the young discovery, Jeni Courtney, as the serious-eyed, unwinsome Fiona—and provides them with dialogue that's idiomatic without resorting to stage Irishry. There are quiet touches of sly humour: Tess, having heard Hugh recounting ancient legends, mutters, “Superstitious old man,” before invoking the nocturnal protection of assorted saints and angels. In an age of overweening special effects, it's also refreshing to see a seal turn into a woman by nothing more intricate than slipping off an artificial sealskin.