English-heiress-turned-IRA-activist Rose Dugdale died on 18 March 2024, days before Baltimore, a fictionalized retelling of key events in her life, was released into Irish and UK cinemas. The film is the latest of a series of fiction and non-fiction features Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have produced – under their writing-and-directing partnership the Desperate Optimists – since Helen (2008), their first full-length film. While their work has been highly regarded critically, its playfully experimental nature has largely restricted it to art-house audiences. The deus ex machina coincidence of the death of the subject and the release of the film increased public awareness of the story, but an audience drawn by curiosity to have the Dugdale phenomenon explained through the accessible medium of cinema was unlikely to have had its expectations satisfied by Baltimore. That putative audience might have been captivated by Tom Comerford’s widescreen cinematography or by Imogen Poots’s committed performance as Rose, as well as by many of the supporting cast, particularly Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as her seasoned IRA comrade Dominic. And the film does explore Dugdale’s trajectory from an extremely privileged upbringing in Devon to the armed robbery in April 1974 of £8 million-worth of paintings from Sir Alfred Beit’s private collection at Russborough House, Co. Wicklow. But it does not attempt to offer a complete account of her life; it is not concerned with Dugdale’s latter fifty – frequently eventful – years, and it is selective and non-linear in the way it presents the earlier events, pursuing a reflexivity that has been a feature of work by the Desperate Optimists.

Given their history, it is unlikely that Lawlor and Molloy ever considered making a straightforward “Dugdale biopic”, but they must in any case have felt themselves relieved of the necessity of providing too much expositional detail owing to several more accessible versions of Dugdale’s life already produced in other forms. The early 2020s saw two chronological biographies vie for the definitive account of her life: Anthony M. Amore’s The Woman Who Stole Vermeer: The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist (Pegasus, 2021) and Sean O’Driscoll’s Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale (2022). The initial episode of Irish-language broadcaster TG4’s 2012 documentary series Mná an IRA (Women of the IRA) features Dugdale offering her own account of her life and actions. The three-part documentary series The Heiress and the Heist focused on the Russborough robbery and was first aired on national broadcaster RTÉ in July 2023. “Rose Dugdale’s life and times would make for a hair-raising movie”, Ed Power began his Irish Times review of the opening episode, “but until Hollywood learns of her existence, a three-part RTÉ documentary must suffice”.

When Baltimore premiered at the Telluride Film Festival two months later, on 1 September 2023, it was not the Hollywood action movie/biopic that Power imagined. Nonetheless, the film was still far from avoiding popular or mainstream generic elements. The pre-title sequence is indicative of Lawlor and Molloy’s departure from a realistic aesthetic. Following some brief context titles – in yellow text on a vibrant red background – relating the principal facts of the robbery and of Rose’s involvement, she is shown lying face down on the floor of a room in Russborough dressed in a suit and surrounded by empty picture frames strewn over the stately décor. In voiceover Rose acknowledges the incongruity of her prone position in the middle of a robbery, before narrating key moments of her early life that are simultaneously presented on screen. The invitation to make a determinist interpretation is open: any of the moments of Rose’s youth may have led her to the current situation. We witness her unhappiness as a ten-year-old girl after killing her first fox; how she was moved on seeing Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus; her disgust at having to attend the “pornographic affair” of the debutantes’ ball at Buckingham Palace, a duty on which her parents insisted if she wanted to study at Oxford. “This hostility, this anger”, her father (Simon Coury) asks her, “where does it come from?” Lying on the floor reflecting on this memory, the adult Rose muses: “Is it really such a bad thing to be angry? I don’t think so. I actually find it… What’s the word?… Exciting”. Getting up from the floor, she opens the door and walks away from the house: her disguise a dishevelled red-haired wig and streaked makeup, reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s Joker stalking away from Gotham Hospital in The Dark Knight. The staging of empathy, artistic sensitivity and class resentment culminates in a masquerade gesturing towards the attractiveness of explosive, anarchic violence, most of which not only encapsulate Rose’s disposition, but have also been abiding concerns of the Desperate Optimists’ films.

Exploration of those themes follows Baltimore’s main title, and the film keeps the questions to the fore by presenting intercut scenes from three time periods: Rose’s embrace of radical left-wing and Irish-republican politics at university and in her post-graduation years; the period of the robbery itself; and the time that Rose, Dominic and Martin (Lewis Brophy) – the younger, more hot-headed IRA comrade – spend with the stolen paintings in a remote cottage in West Cork waiting to hear news of how their ransom demands are considered. This structure is formalised spatially at two points when three-way split screen is used at narrative transitional moments. Of the elements of a triptych structure, the robbery provides the most direct occasion for smaller acts of violence – an out-of-control Martin strikes Beit (John Kavanagh) on the head with the butt of his rifle, for example, and Rose is stabbed in the hand – within the already brutal robbery conducted at the point of Kalashnikovs. While the staging of the crime is exciting, the parallel editing between temporalities ameliorates its intensity – initially, at least – by cutting away from the heightened moments to less fraught time periods, which allows for reflection or the provision of context. Eventually the triptych structure builds to the coincidence of two moments when Rose is on the point of shooting someone: she draws her pistol on a defiant Lady Beit (Andrea Irvine) in the basement of Russborough, and she aims her gun at Donal (Dermot Crowley), a friendly West Cork farmer whose curiosity may have compromised the hideaway location. As the camera lingers on her face in both cases, the intensity of her gaze suggests that she is capable of killing but, in both instances, she resists pulling the trigger. Some degree of self-reflection and conscious thought process allows her, in contrast to Martin, to control her anger.

Alongside the film’s closing images, these decisive moments also illuminate the possible fate of the stolen paintings. Removed from stately Russborough and arranged around the walls of the humble cottage hideaway, these works of art prompt Rose, Dominic and Martin to discuss their meanings in the days that they live among them. In Rubens’s Venus and Jupiter Dominic sees the birth of imperialism. For Rose, the fascination of Goya’s Doña Antonia Zárate is that the woman in the portrait is evidently pretending to be something she is not – a comment that perhaps reflects her own acts of masquerade: dressing as a man to gain entry to the Oxford Union to protest the exclusion of women; donning a red wig and affecting a French accent to become a hapless tourist to gain entry to Russborough; transforming from heiress to revolutionary. Despite the paintings’ revelatory power, Rose reminds her comrades that they may have to destroy them if their ransom demands are not met. She insists that she would be able to do it, but alongside the eschewed shootings, the film’s final scene suggests otherwise. As Rose attempts to escape to the safe house in Baltimore, armed police surround and arrest her. Sitting in the back of the police car as they gather the paintings and other evidence, she imagines herself covertly taking Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid and sailing out to sea with it.

The use of Baltimore as the film’s title and intertextuality with previous Desperate Optimists’ films indicates that she may not be sailing for the safe house where her lover Eddie (Jack Meade) is now holed up with Martin and Dominic. The word “Baltimore” may make Irish audiences think firstly of that West Cork town, but international audiences would inevitably think of the US city in Maryland, a fact that led to its subsequent US release with the more on-the-nose title Rose’s War. The filmmakers have retained Baltimore elsewhere because it links with the Desperate Optimists’ previous film, The Future Tense (2022). One element of The Future Tense is a sketch for a biopic of Dugdale in the non-fiction essayistic form they had used in Further Beyond (2016). The earlier film had been their sketch for a biopic of Ambrose O’Higgins, the Irish-born viceroy of Peru and father of Chilean liberator Bernardo O’Higgins. The Future Tense opens with Lawlor and Molloy alternately on camera sitting at a table in their home reading a script recounting their experiences of journeying back to Ireland to scout locations for a biopic of Rose Dugdale. Their reading continues as voiceover on footage from the plane and their trip around Ireland, along with a variety of other visual material that constitutes an exploration of Lawlor and Molloy’s relationship to England as Dubliners who have long lived and worked in Britain, but who have become alienated from the country since Brexit. They are accompanied on the trip by their London-born daughter Molly Rose, who stands in for Dugdale at several locations including in the film’s final shot, where she stands on the pier at Baltimore looking out to sea. In voiceover, Molloy speculates initially on what Dugdale planned to do when she had stood there in 1974 but turns to consider the possible island utopias that their daughter might discover if she voyaged out to sea, leaving behind the fraught relationship between Ireland and England.