IT'S LITERATURE'S GREATEST AFFIRMATION, the most joyous poetic release and a climax that shook the world when it arrived in 1922. Lying in bed, recalling her romantic life in expressive, sensual detail, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, that breathless final chapter of Ulysses, is some of the most captivating prose ever written. Yet it's taken more than 80 years to fulfil James Joyce's hope of Molly gasping that famous "Yes" to a mainstream cinema audience.

"Initially, I felt a mixture of pride and terror," says Angeline Ball about her casting in Bloom, director Sean Walsh's audacious attempt to adapt the unfilmable with a budget of just £3.5 million. As the earthy, plain-speaking Molly, Ball stars alongside a lugubrious Stephen Rea as Bloom and the boyish Hugh O'Conor as poet and Joycean self-portrait Stephen Dedalus.

"I saw Bloom as my swansong," admits the actress who won an IFTA award, an Irish Bafta for her performance. "I thought it would be amazing for my career or ruin it if I didn't get it right. It might have been terribly different."

It was Joyce who opened Dublin's first cinema in 1909. And he discussed adapting Ulysses with the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, though he thought "the book could not be made into a film with artistic propriety". Set on a single date in Dublin's history, 16 June, 1904, the day Joyce and Molly's prototype, his wife-to-be Nora, met for their first date, Ulysses was the Irishman's own appropriation of Homer's Odyssey, a mock-heroic life in the day of Jewish ad canvasser Leopold Bloom. As humorous, humane and suffused with the ordinary as it is the extraordinary, the encyclopaedic and experimental, Ulysses is packed with music, jokes, allusions and "so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant". For many would-be readers, these flourishes and the intellectual flash of Stephen Dedalus' early thoughts serve to return the novel to the bookshelf long before Bloom is introduced in the fourth chapter.

"How can a novel be so well known and regarded, yet nobody I knew had ever read the damn thing?" asks Walsh. "The way some have hijacked Joyce and made him an inner sanctum of insider knowledge is painful because the book is as relevant today as it ever was. "I never went to university. I was an everyman coming to this great tome. But the more I read and the more I saw of the puzzles, the jokes, the little tricks he plays, the more I realised what an important task it was to open it up."

Walsh declines to discuss the only previous attempt to film the novel, American director Joseph Strick's more literal and sometimes impenetrable 1967 Ulysses, banned in Ireland until 2000 and unseen by all but committed Joyceans. But he does maintain that "Bloom is opening art up to a wider audience, whether people like it or not. Here is this hidden treasure and I can get you to the end of it, via a film. That's not been done before, I don't think."

Even so, every word in Bloom remains Joyce's. Walsh has simply changed the chronology, excised several episodes and favours Molly and Poldy's relationships over Stephen's smart-Erse scholarship. Most strikingly though, Molly's soliloquy now bookends the story, head to toe like the couple in the marital bed. "Generally, I prefer the simpler, more human bits of Ulysses," explains Walsh. "If we'd only had Molly at the end it would have been a disaster. She eases us in and lets us meet one of the great characters up front."

Ball was unfamiliar with the novel before Rea encouraged her to audition, but quickly appreciated the challenge she was facing. "Molly is so ingrained in Irish history," she says. "Everyone's perception of her is different, so to make her physical and take her to a broader audience was extremely daunting. I was aware of a huge Joycean following out there watching my every move.

"Audiences can either attach to her or attack her really, because reading the book or watching the movie, you warm to Bloom's internal thoughts. The way Stephen plays him there's something downtrodden, something sad and melancholy. To have this woman saying she's cheating on him and doesn't care, you're setting yourself up for an audience to hate you. So there was a fine balance between doing it with humour and naivety, aggression and confidence."

Though best known for her performance in the funny and foul-mouthed The Commitments, Ball was nevertheless concerned about Ulysses' explicit language. The frank depictions of sex, masturbation and defecation ensured the novel was initially banned in Britain.

"I still consider some of the dialogue to be slightly bawdy and crude," she explains. "I approached Sean after reading the script and said I didn't want to do any naked scenes because I think the text speaks for itself and there's sensuality in suggestion. And he agreed. It's not that I was afraid of being nude. We did do two or threes scenes that didn't make it to the final cut. The scene where she climbs on Bloom's face I was worried about, but we got around it. The framing has it saying exactly what it's saying in the book, but it's not explicit really."

Ball kept a secret from colleagues on the film. "I found out I was pregnant on the day I flew to Dublin, which was a surprise, a wonderful surprise," she reveals. "I made up my mind not to tell anyone, not because I wanted to deceive them in any way. I just didn't want them mollycoddling me, if you'll excuse the pun, because everyone was pulling together on such a tight budget. And the good thing was that I got very rotund in a way, my breasts grew, which was fabulous for Molly. I had to separate the maternal thing from my mind, though, because I didn't want to connect Molly's loss of a son with my unborn daughter."

Walsh certainly appreciated Ball's contribution to an artistic endeavour that took him ten years to realise - three more than Joyce needed to write the novel.

"Nobody believed I could make this film," he recalls. "My first feature film, based on James Joyce's Ulysses, complex copyright, period costume drama, independent budget. They thought there were too many ducks in a row lined up to be shot. And they were right. Except they weren't. "I never had concerns about Angeline. For Molly you need two things. You need a look and you need a sound. Angeline just has that sound, naturally. A lot of people, when they heard I'd cast her, only knew her from The Commitments and said 'oh, you're in trouble there'. But they hadn't heard what I'd heard, which was Angeline doing Molly's soliloquy spontaneously; 95 per cent of her voiceover is from a first take and that's who Molly is. If you rehearse too much you're going to lose her essence.

"Molly has this image and it's that sex is the only thing on the agenda. In my view, she's very much the mirror image of Leopold Bloom. Creative. Witty. Intelligent. Pragmatic. Sad. Happy. All of those things. She's just as modern as Bloom, I think."

There have been a few dissenting voices, but most Joyceans have expressed admiration for Walsh's efforts. Senator David Norris, a former Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, says: "Walsh and his talented team approach Joyce using the visual vocabulary of the cinema in a manner I have no doubt Joyce himself would have approved. Stephen Rea provides a masterly and brilliant evocation of Bloom, managing to convey at the same time his Irishness, his Jewishness, his cosmopolitanism and his humanity, while Angeline Ball is quite the best of all the myriad of Molly Blooms that I have seen."

"I get invited all over the world whenever Bloomsday [fans celebrate Ulysses on, of course, 16 June] comes around," laughs Ball. "Women come up to me after seeing it and tell me they really loved Molly, but men love her too. It's unusual to get the two together, the women liking her because she speaks her mind and feels comfortable with her body, and the men because she's so free with her sexuality.

"And I really love our ending. Lots of people asked how I was going to handle the screaming, but I'd never heard it like that in my head. I thought it was meant to be tender and so I'm proud because this is something new. When people imagine the 'yes, yes, yes', I like the fact that it just flows away, like the sea."

• Bloom screens at Glasgow Film Theatre, 16-17 June, Dundee Contemporary Arts from 23 June, and the MacRobert Centre, Stirling, 4-5 July. This article: http://living.scotsman.com/film.cfm?id=817662006

Only Shakespeare casts a longer shadow over English language literature than James Joyce, but it's hard to imagine a writer whose work, which was marked by an obsession with language and technical experimentation, lends itself less readily to film.

'Ulysses', Joyce's 1922 novel about the intertwining lives of three 1904 Dubliners, has been adapted for the cinema just once before - in 1967 by Joseph Strick. This 2003 adaptation, the result of a decade of dedication by first-time filmmaker Sean Walsh, is an ambitious attempt to give shape to the novel's unwieldy form while navigating the stream of consciousness that runs through it.

Not every element comes off, and without at least some knowledge of Joyce the film's intentions become increasingly hard to read. Nevertheless, it's a lavish period production, and a noble attempt to snatch Joyce back from the rarefied halls of academia and reinstate him - along with the some of the saucy interludes and cheerful smut that got the book banned in 1922 - as literature's first voyager into the realm of the subconscious.

You may as well attempt to weigh the sky as summarise the plot, but loosely put it follows a day - 16 June 1904 - in the life of Jewish advertising salesman Leopold Bloom (Rea), his spirited wife Molly (Ball) and the precociously intellectual young poet Stephen Dedalus (O'Conor). Bloom sets out one morning to schlep through Dublin, en route attending a funeral, rubbing up against a drunken anti-semite in the pub and later masturbating on a beach, unaware that the insatiable Molly is enjoying a rather more sociable sexual encounter back home. But Bloom's real journey is through the intricate maze of his own memories and unspoken desires, a rambling expedition inward which in the film, as in Joyce, is loaded with myth and symbol.

As the day ends Bloom finds himself adrift in the city's bawdy Nighttown district. There he hooks up with the sozzled Dedalus, who is on his own mission to define the meaning and purpose of art. It's at this point that, depending on your perspective, the film either springs into life or stumbles into unintelligibility, as Bloom is forced to atone for his sins in a surreal court sequence, and cavorts with a prostitute who satisfies his latent desire for transgsressive sex games.

Any attempt to film a book whose significance lies entirely in its prose style is probably doomed to come up short. Although much of Joyce's writing is kept intact (the film opens and closes with extracts from Molly's famously unpunctuated soliloquy - the strongest moments here), the reliance on picturesque landscapes and soothing voiceovers render certain sequences rather pallid.

Obscurity, too, is a stumbling block: the point of Stephen Dedalus is that he's brilliant beyond comprehension. But passages which, in the novel, are puzzling but beautifully conveyed here become frustratingly cryptic. Indeed, faithfulness to the book is both the film's greatest strength and its fatal flaw, the structure frequently threatening to collapse as the story recreates the randomness of Bloom's own thoughts, rather like Sunday evening TV on hallucinogens. But Rea and, particularly Ball, bring warmth and wit to the film, and director Walsh has a keen eye for colour and bawdy comedy. Those already sympathetic to Joyce should find this adaptation by turns courageous, frustrating, intriguing, and about as accessible as the source material allows.

I loved the performances of all but especially Rea & Ball, who were stupendous, but, even more, was charmed by Sean Walsh's voice-over comments explaining why he followed certain decisions and explaining quite a few mysteries about Joyce. Although Bloom was sad, it ended on a mellow but sweet note. 

You must be very proud of having produced this as every detail has been lovingly rendered and it communicates beautifully to any viewer.  I love Joyce but one does not have to be a scholar to enjoy this film.  I can see why the cinematographer won an award.  I was, after having just been at The Castle and The Canal, thrilled to see them shot so crisply.  The landscapes on Dalkey Island and at Dollymount were exquisite.

Below is a selection of reviews from the French release of Bloom.

Paris Match - Christine Haas  
Sean Walsh donne vie au déroulemennt de la pensée informelle et met en images les ruses de l'écrivain. Tout en suivant le fil du monologue intérieur, il privilégie ce qu'il y ade plus accessible à nos émotions. Les appels de mémoire et les associations d'idées s'incarnent magnifiquement.

Libération - Stéphane PIATZSZEK   
premier film cahoteux et inconfortable mais de tempérament original et charmant. On pourrait juger sa mission impossible : Joyce est réputé illisible aussi bien qu'inadaptable. Bloom échappe à cette fatalité en choisissant de ne pas adapter Ulysse de front, ni de travers. Il l'évoque. Et lui fait les poches. Il l'habite épisodiquement, profite de ses situations et lui marche parfois sur les pieds. Mais Bloom atteint aussi la consistance d'une petite peinture originale et turbulente, éperdument éprise de son modèle.

aVoir-aLire.com - Sophie Lecerf  
Avec Bloom, Sean Walsh réussit le coup de force improbable de parvenir à porter le vertigineux Ulysse sur grand écran. Bloom est fidèle à Ulysse car il est moderne et universel. Les lecteurs de Joyce regretteront certainement que le parallèle homérique n'apparaisse que de façon anecdotique ou que le film ignore en grande partie les questions politiques. Le spectateur aura tout le temps de s'y intéresser car Bloom l'incitera sans aucun doute à se replonger dans Joyce.

Aficionados of James Joyce should go and see “Bloom”, an adaptation of Ulysses. Cinema-lovers should also see this remarkable film; indeed it is an odyssey. You will swing from frustration to pure pleasure and all emotions in between as the
story takes you through a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, his wife
Molly and the character of Stephen.

Bloom and Molly have been married for 16 years. Both are wandering from the straight and narrow, and Stephen is trying to come to terms with the death of his mother. The personal narrative for each character slickly allows you into their sometimes confusing thoughts.

Sex plays a very large part in the film and some of it is fantastically raunchy, especially what we see of Molly who speaks ‘Sex and the City’ type dialogue decades before it surprised us on TV. No wonder the book had problems getting published under British and American laws. Having said that, the sexual content is pertinent to each character’s situation.

This is an art house film, not mainstream in the least. However the production values are exceptional: lighting, camerawork, production design and music are extraordinary. Bloom, (Stephen Rea) and Molly (Angeline Ball) were inspired casting. It’s here that the voice-over narrative works best, as you would expect from the leads, with Mr Rea delivering lugubrious lines with his accustomed skill. It is, though, his facial expressions which explain most of Bloom’s circumstance, which I won’t reveal here as it spoils the plot.

Ah, Molly! A woman to die for. Ms Ball is a tour de force and for the viewer, male or female, Molly will strike a note in your life. Ulysses is a work that many have found difficult to penetrate and sometimes when you watch this film you will feel the same, but I urge you to see it for all its values. It won’t wash over you as you munch popcorn; it will make you think.

"The film is a highly skilful work that captures much of the sweep and scope, the all-encompassing particularity, profanity and profundity, of its source.

Cleverly structured and interwoven, it's faithful to Ulysses's modernist spirit, multiple narratives and voices, everyday language, its fascination with such universals as birth, death, sex and defecation.

It's a period piece that feels utterly contemporary, and not just because of its representations of anti-Semitism, its references to foot-and-mouth disease, and the fact that at the end of the film, after the film has faded to black for the final credits, Bloom is seen stepping out of 1904 and into a crowded modern-day Dublin.

The language of Ulysses remains vigorous, musical, modern. The film is also especially good at rendering visible the ever-spiralling fantasies and hallucinations of the Nighttown section of the book, the fits and starts of our internal thoughts and daydreams, and the undercurrents of sexuality. Stephen Rea perfectly portrays Leopold Bloom's baleful resignation and cultured vanity, and Angeline Ball is utterly venal, conniving and captivating, she is word become flesh again."

"With Stephen Rea typically morose as Leopold Bloom and Angeline Ball breathing raw sexuality as his wife Molly, Bloom is an ambitious film. Metaphors are made visible. There are scenes in which characters levitate, and jump cuts that shatter the illusory realism of 1904 or the standard conventions of period drama by which the past is typically represented on screen.

Ball is superb; she brings the carnality of Molly Bloom to life without substituting a modern woman for the character. She is a creature of 1904 with human desires that her time suppressed beneath a veil of gentility. The undercurrent of sexuality that runs through Walsh’s film is a success: it captures the quality that shocked Joyce’s original readers."

"It’s a literary work so daunting in scale and reputation that just one filmmaker has ever had the courage to adapt Ulysses for the big screen

US director Joseph Strick's 1967 treatment of Ulysses was subsequently banned for 33 years and, as a result, James Joyce's epic never really permeated the consciousness of cinema- lovers. Until now, that is. Next Sunday sees the Irish premiere of a new screen version of Ulysses, and critics are already hailing it as a masterpiece.

Bloom, written and directed by Seán Walsh and shot on location in Dublin last year, features a stellar cast and is largely faithful to Joyce's work. Excitement is growing in advance of Sunday night's screening at the Galway Film Fleadh.

While the book remains one of the great literary paradoxes possibly the most famous of the 20th century but remaining unread by the masses. The new film will make many more familiar with the fictional events of June 16, 1904. "Ulysses is recognised as the greatest novel of the 20th century and yet it has always been my view that the book remains hidden to the vast majority of people," Mr Walsh said."In adapting the novel, I set myself three goals: firstly, to present the story to a wider audience; secondly, to reveal the utter humanity and, indeed, humour of the novel; and, thirdly, to attempt to sketch some of the styles and tricks employed by Joyce," he said.

The last of those reasons is also the inspiration behind the unusual typography in the film's title. "I had never intended to call it Ulysses, because if you say that, people will think they need a degree in English to watch this film."So I decided to call it Bloom, and when I gave the graphic designer the brief, she came back with the idea that if Joyce could fool around with typography and literary styles, then she could do the same. She came up with Bloom and I loved it." Cinema fans will love it, too, if its reception at Italy's Taormina BNL Film Festival last month is anything to go by. The 5m film had its world premiere there and was widely praised.

In particular, the performances of Stephen Rea, as Leopold Bloom, and Angeline Ball, as his wife, were lauded. Rea is brilliantly at ease in Leopold's shoes, despite the complexity of the character, while Ball is simply scintillating as the sensual Molly. "The book was shocking at the time," said Walsh. "In its mundaneness, it is extraordinary because our lives contain waking up, going to the toilet, masturbation, birth and death and sex, that's in the book and therefore it's replicated in the film.

Ireland's best-known Joycean scholar, Senator David Norris gave the movie his full backing. "The film is brilliant, witty, innovative and imaginatively faithful to Joyce's work," he said. Effusive praise, though, won't be enough to get it into cinemas worldwide and Walsh is currently working hard at putting distributionn deals in place. Whereas Ulysses tells the story of Leopold's one-day odyssey through Dublin, Bloom was an odyssey of 10 years work for Walsh.

"Bloom is a bawdy, irreverent, lyrical, compassionate, anguished, earthy, profound and deeply humane slice of life, performe with verve and intelligence by a superb ensemble cast led by Stephen Rea’s soulful and and stocial Bloom, Angeline Ball’s sensually direct Molly and Hugh O’Conor’s boyish Stephen."