The Crying Game

“Don’t give away the ending!”, the filmmakers, lead by screenwriter-director Neil Jordan, were pleading after the first press screenings. Even apart from the legendary twist, the film, which gained massive political controversy as well as six Academy Award nominations in main categories (winning the one for best original screenplay) is still, twenty years since the premiere, a breathtaking drama with a star cast: British soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker) is kidnapped by a cell of the IRA, and during the nerve-wrecking wait for the ransom demands his watchman, the “volunteer” Fergus (Stephen Rea), get into conversations with the prisoner of sports, love and human nature. In the chaotic inferno of shooting and arriving tanks, Fergus manages to escape to London where he assumes a new identity and looks for the hairdresser, Dil, to deliver a message from Jody to her… As Dave Berry sang in 1964, then Boy George, is what Dil hums when she feels sad: “One day soon I’m gonna tell the Moon about the crying game…”