Rose’s War, originally titled Baltimore, is the true story of English debutante Rose Dugdale and her revolutionary adventures fighting for freedom in Northern Ireland.
In Rose’s War, Imogen Poots plays the unlikely rebel who left her world behind and joined a group of rebels in the 1970s who fought a class war for freedom in Northern Ireland. A rich English girl doing something like that is news enough, but she and her group also managed to pull off one of the biggest art heists in modern times.
Rose joined a gang of armed rebels including Dominic (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) and Martin (Lewis Brophy). They raided an English home and hauled away many, many valuable paintings. Rose had seen them all before and was clear about what they meant. But the working class blokes she was hanging around had never been exposed to anything like that before and were stuck by the power of the art.
They bombed a police station with homemade bombs dropped from a helicopter. My description of the plot sounds exciting, but I found the film tediously slow, almost boring. The dissonant sound track by composer Stephen McKeon was more exciting than the action in the movie.
Rose was eventually captured and sent to prison.
I’m sure the film will be more interesting to people involved in the historic events of that time, but it didn’t light much of a fire in me. Rose’s War was written and directed by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy.
I hoped going into the film that there would be parallels between Ireland’s troubles in the 1970s and the current political scene in the US, but I didn’t see anything like that. Rose was pregnant during the time the film describes and ended up having her child while in prison. Wikipedia has lots of information about her that wasn’t in the film. including what she did after she left prison.
The film is streaming on Hulu. If you watch it and find it more interesting than I did, I’d love to hear your thoughts. The comments are open.