2010-04-20
N/A
15 min
Eight-year-old Ardal has a romantic heart and a passionate crush on his second-class teacher, Ms Purdy. But his dreams of marrying his love are dashed when she becomes engaged to her boyfriend, who Ardal deems entirely unacceptable. Inspired by his favourite western movies, he decides that his only course of action is to challenge his rival to a duel.
Although it's a bit far-fetched, I did quite enjoy this story of unrequited love. Young "Ardal" (Oran Creagh) takes a shine to his second grade teacher "Miss Purdy" (Olga Wehrly) and after a bit of quizzing of his parents, concludes that he can marry her in 2015! A shopping trip in town puts a spanner in his works though when he encounters her, newly sporting an engagement ring from her boyfriend (Rory Keenan). "Ardal" is distraught, then he hits on an idea. He will challenge the man to a duel for the hand of the fair maiden. The boyfriend - who's a bit of an eedjit if truth be told, thinks it's all a joke - but is it? Creagh offers us quite an engaging performance as the loved-up young lad and there's quite a fun dinner-table chat with his parents where he offers up a worrying degree of eight year old maturity! It's quite endearingly written and though it does fall away towards the end, I suppose we've all had a crush at one stage that'd we have done (virtually) anything to fulfil!
