The fugitive romance “Kisses” is many things.
Irish writer-director Lance Daly’s feature is a lyrical charmer with serrated edges. How can a story about two neighboring 11-year-olds on the lam in a big city not be?
With its rough, working-class surroundings, “Kisses” shares DNA with the films of Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank”). Like the former’s “Sweet Sixteen,” Daly’s movie has subtitles for its loamy accents.
“Kisses” is also a love story in which tenderness is a rarity. Instead of honoring crushes and the promise of a first kiss, the teens who live in Kylie and Dylan’s hard-scrabble neighborhood tease them with jaded advice about sex acts.
Dylan (Shane Curry) and Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) have every reason to flee their homes. After an altercation, the boy escapes his father’s fury by locking himself in the bathroom. Had Jack Torrance from “The Shining” gone berserk at his home instead of a haunted hotel, this is how his paternal fury would have played out.
Did we mention it is Christmas Day?
Next door, Kylie grows quiet when her uncle arrives bearing gifts. “Give him a kiss,” mom insists. Kylie’s reluctance hints at trespass and sorrow.
Once the pair escape, a different Dylan — the Minnesota-born troubadour Bob — provides a throughline to their journey.
A boat captain sings an off-key but loving rendition of “Shelter From the Storm.” A street musician wrapped in Christmas lights offers a rousing version of another tune. The man himself makes a mystical appearance. Or does he?
Like many a road flick, “Kisses” offers tantalizing glimpses of a place. A quest to find Dylan’s older brother — who escaped two years earlier — provides the movie reason to nose into Dublin’s darker alleyways and meaner streets. This Dublin is a town of immigrants, buskers and all-night food joints. There are squatters on Gardiner Street and homeless runaways who temporarily nest by the River Liffey.
The sweet promise of Daly’s title speaks to an intimate gesture that either, as a young black woman tells Dylan, gives or takes.
The score has a twang that reminds us that there’s a kind of westward hope in the journey.
Even so, the lark grows dark in precisely the ways it can for young runaways without resources financial or physical.
When the duo are separated, being a fugitive becomes a lonesome business.
The film’s hues are desaturated. Life on the “kip” begins in blacks and grays. Yet the blossoming and fading blues and reds that kiss the action don’t signal that all is right with the characters’ world. Kylie and Dylan’s journey is not a simple tale of liberation with no looking back.
Curry and O’Neill have natural onscreen presence. And Daly captures his young stars’ faces in states of innocence and wariness.
“Kisses.”
Unrated. 1 hour, 25 minutes. Written and directed by Lance Daly; starring Kelly O’Neill, Shane Curry, Stephen Rea, Paul Roe, Neili Conroy, David Bendito, Jose Jimanez, Willie Higgins, and Elizabeth Suh. Opens today at Regency Theatres Tamarac Square.
