The image of a kite, flying free, then suddenly lost, conveys the bittersweet mood and perhaps entire meaning of this film: a brief, shining moment of balance and joy in the shadow of great change, and deep loss.

The most magical summer of his life is recalled by an adult narrator, who we come to know as an eleven-year-old boy. In 1936, Michael lives in a farmhouse full of women — his mother and her sisters — in County Donegal, near the Irish village of Ballybog. On the threshold of harvest, in the fullness of childhood, Michael experiences a glimpse of wholeness with the completion of the family by two male relatives. Uncle Jack, the mythical eldest brother who's been off to Africa for twenty-five years has finally come home. At almost the same moment, Michael's father, the free-spirited Gerry Adams, zooms up on his motorbike for a rare visit.

The male characters and the rest of the Mundy women orbit around and collide with the eldest sister, Kate, the schoolteacher: strict and practical — to a fault. Though Irish Catholic, Kate Mundy (Meryl Streep) is the living embodiment of H. L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism: "the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time." Like all control freaks, Kate is driven by fear: she is mostly afraid of anybody, anywhere exceeding the bounds of her settled order of things — especially the highly-spontaneous Gerry Adams.

Kate polices the boundaries where Gerry is concerned: forbidding Michael to ride with his father on his motorbike, or sleep overnight with him in the barn where he has been exiled. Kate is just as hard on her own family. She nags her brother Jack to take his medicine and go to bed. She stifles her sisters as well, Maggie's impulse to sing, and poor addled Rosie's childlike impulse to up and dance.

Kate is quick to speak, and usually with a sermon: on "Modesty," though she is far from modest (unlike her more circumspect sister, Agnes). Or on "Respectability," but it's hard to respect someone who uses words and formality as weapons to both impose her will on others, and shield herself from life. She insists on calling Gerry "Mr. Adams," and speaks of her own nephew as an "illegitimate child" in the presence of his mother. As with all bullies, beneath Kate's bluff, she's quite fragile: i.e. she's "all talk". This includes all talk of religion: her Catholic faith seems mostly a disguise for her need for control; she clings to to a form of godliness, but mistakes her fear and intolerance of disorder for purity.

But if "Mr. Adams" poses a threat to Kate's coventional household order, even Gerry doesn't begin to reach the furthest extreme on the spectrum: Jack, the sainted missionary, turns out to be a most unsettling surprise. On arrival, his suitcase pops open to reveal a carved African mask (to the shock of the sour-faced village priest, Father Carlin!). Poor Father Jack went to Africa and lost both his religion and his reason. Jack's "gone native": with a childlike disconnectedness, he associates ordinary daily incidents with the mythic world of archetypes and ritual in which he lives. He has left linear history and thinking, and entered a contrary realm indeed: where Kate shows approval, Jack expresses glee: for example, he calls Michael a "love child", and urges all the sisters to each have a love child (and hints that in his African houseboy, Ocowa, he had his own brand of love child).

Yet both Kate and Jack have occasional lapses, from opposite directions, into a common humanity.

Kate lapses from abstraction, coming temporarily down to earth. She is capable of astonishing glimpses of self-knowledge ("I AM a righteous bitch, aren't I?"). She genuinely loves her sisters, and is prone to unexpected moments where she relinquishes control. Immediately after forbidding Christina to see Gerry, Kate sends her out the door with the assurance that she's beautiful. Kate also has tender moments with Michael, with whom she feels a special connection. She tells him they are alike, both "Ganders," a reference to her nickname, a popular recognition of her outsider status.

Jack, on the other hand, lapses into wholeness from the opposite direction, from pure experience to wisdom, from pure subjectivity to moments of conceptual brilliance: we are forced to wonder sometimes if the old codger as crazy as he lets on.

It is Jack, for example, who gently confronts Gerry Adams about the younger man's characteristic aimlessness and irresponsibility. One of the women says of Gerry, "All he could ever do was dance," and it's true — for good and for ill. When he first shows up, Gerry dances with Christina, the mother of their son; but he later dances with Agnes, singing "Anything Goes" in a way that makes us think he takes that sentiment seriously, and we are encouraged (along with Christina and Jack, who are watching) to consider the anarchy lurking in unrestricted freedom. The potentials for pagan excess are also seen in the wild eyes of Danny Bradley. Rose sneaks off with Danny to dance around the Lughnasa fires, and the consequence suggests Kate's restrictive and even judgmental tendencies aren't without their positive sides.

The struggle between order and freedom, between nature and all that is not nature, is depicted in all its messy ambiguity and everlasting see-saw. Yet any film which so obviously sets in conflict opposing tendencies usually seeks some kind of resolution.

Perhaps the clue is to be found in what Dancing at Lughnasa has to say about the imagination.

Kate's characteristic and chilly abstraction is contrasted with Jack's warm love of the concrete: he loves rituals, ceremonies, symbols — not just that African mask, but also his flamboyant feathered hat. Like all primitives, he connects everything that happens to the super deeds of mythical archetypes, which give meaning to ordinary life. At dinner, Jack demonstrates how Africans share a communal harvest blessing — which very nearly creates community at the table, until, of course, the passed bowl of fruit reaches Kate and she puts an end to such pagan nonsense.

Michael's identification with Kate in this paucity of imagination is confirmed: he is a serious little boy, who speaks little, and we never really see him playing. Aunt Maggie claims Michael is blessed with a great imagination, but the viewer only gets evidence to the contrary. When Gerry Adams coaxes his son to pretend they see a unicorn horn on some neighborhood sheep, Michael (in Kate-like fashion) offers the sober correction that traits of unicorns belong properly to horses, not sheep. When Maggie tells Michael he ought to be off playing in the fields like a calf, the boy responds "I'm not a calf. I'm Michael Adams." He may be Gerry's son, but he's also Kate's nephew: prosaic and literal, a firm grip on form, but detached from existential experience.

Kate covers her need for control with Christian piety, but it's just a different kind of religious mask: the trait is neither inherent to Christianity or religion. She could have been an uptight agnostic or Muslim and the story could have been told exactly the same. Her real faith is Modernity, the religion where nothing is sacred. During the period of its hegemony, the Modern spirit affected everything it touched, including the Christian religion.

A most plentiful fruit of the practical and abstract Modern way of thinking is Western science. Accordingly, one more bit of magic this wonderous summer is the new-fangled wireless radio the family keeps trying to get to work. When the music finally does come through, Father Jack — for whom everything is sacred — pronounces it a miracle. Kate, full of the Modern spirit of debunking, smothers that idea. "It's no miracle. It is Science."

Rosie is in many ways on same channel as Jack, and so defends her brother's characterization of the music on the wireless: it's NOT Science. It's Lugh, the pagan god of the harvest, the god of the harvest festival, Lughnasa, "a time of music and dance".

Father Jack seems slightly ahead of his time. Over the past century, Christian missionaries, frustrated by the recurring phenomenon of native converts sneaking back to the witchdoctor, have reassessed their 19th century slash-and-burn style. Clearly, Christianity as expressed within the characteristically abstract Modern paradigm has left certain fundamental human needs unmet. Like the kite, human beings are suspended between worlds, of nature and something higher. We mediate these upper and lower realms symbolically. Stories of the gods are a poetic expression of something deeper that lose something in translation to words; dance and ritual are more immediate expressions, fundamental human needs translated into movement. The cry of the human spirit against the abstractions of Modernity is expressed by the Mundy sisters: "I don't care how drunk and sweaty they are. I want to dance. It's the festival of Lughnasa and I want to Dance."

So then, imagine with me for a moment, if you can, or if you will, that young Michael Adams grows up to be just like his Aunt Kate: maybe not holding onto the form of her Christian faith, but remaining true to the religion of Modernity. Now stretch your imagination. Let's say he goes off to and comes home from the war to, through some extremely unlikely twists of fate, become a film reviewer. Keep stretching: imagine him reviewing this film.

The no-nonsense Mr. Adams, a man of systematic and literalist tendencies, could, of course, be relied upon as a fount of relevant facts, such as:

...the annual festival of Lughnasa takes its name from Lugh, an ancient Celtic hero who was raised to mythical status as a god of the sun, fire, and crafts, before he was lowered with the rest of the Irish gods to the level of the fairies, Lugh being the root word of "Leprechauan", etc...