Lynn Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (after the novel by Alan Warner) is elliptical, opaque, and utterly gorgeous. The eponymous character (played with an almost alien blankness by the brilliant Samantha Morton) is a young, working-class Scottish woman (she works in a supermarket by day, and goes clubbing at night) who wakes up on Christmas morning (or the day before, I wasn’t sure) to discover that her boyfriend has killed himself. He’s left her a mixtape (which becomes the movie’s soundtrack, with music that ranges from Aphex Twin to Nancy Sinatra to the Velvet Underground to the Mamas and the Papas), and a suicide note with two requests: that she use his bank account to pay for his funeral, and that she send his novel to a publisher. Instead, she covers up his death, uses the funeral money to buy her and a girlfriend a vacation in southern Spain, and submits the novel under her own name.
That’s about it, as far as plot is concerned. And character motivation is entirely inscrutable.What we are left with, instead, is a film of atmosphere, drift, and escape. And it’s great.
Morvern Callar has very little dialog; besides the brilliant soundtrack music, there is lots of silence. Visually, there are lots of close-ups without establishing shots, odd angles, unexpected cuts, and continually varying lighting, which ranges from Scottish winter gloom to Spanish blinding sunlight, and from flashing neon and disco strobe lights to the fluorescent glare of the supermarket.
The start of the film looked almost Bressonian to me. (Interestingly, in an interview about the film, Ramsay speaks, not of Bresson’s framing and editing, but of his use of sound). But just as the light modulates from scene to scene, so the overall look and feel of the film modulate too. Morvern Callar simply drifts so beautifully, that it is not until a good way through that I realized that it was not in the least about aimlessness and anomie (which is how it seemed at first); rather, it is about escape. Morvern is looking for a way out, and she finds it. Although much of the movie is sad or disturbing, it is really a passionate and affirmative film. Though this affirmation-in-the-face-of-what-might-seem-to-others-as-deprivation is not spiritual in the manner of Bresson, but something even harder to give definition to. Morvern Callar is subtly, but powerfully, subversive, all the more so in that it never gives up its punk blankness and lack of direction, but turns these into positive qualities. What’s so moving about the film, finally, is something that I can only express oxymoronically: the way it gives palpable presence to the most evanescent of feelings, without them ever losing their evanescence.
Morvern Callar
Lynn Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (after the novel by Alan Warner) is elliptical, opaque, and utterly gorgeous. The eponymous character (played with an almost alien blankness by the brilliant Samantha Morton) is a young, working-class Scottish woman (she works in a supermarket by day, and goes clubbing at night) who wakes up on Christmas morning (or the day before, I wasn’t sure) to discover that her boyfriend has killed himself. He’s left her a mixtape (which becomes the movie’s soundtrack, with music that ranges from Aphex Twin to Nancy Sinatra to the Velvet Underground to the Mamas and the Papas), and a suicide note with two requests: that she use his bank account to pay for his funeral, and that she send his novel to a publisher. Instead, she covers up his death, uses the funeral money to buy her and a girlfriend a vacation in southern Spain, and submits the novel under her own name.
That’s about it, as far as plot is concerned. And character motivation is entirely inscrutable.What we are left with, instead, is a film of atmosphere, drift, and escape. And it’s great.
Morvern Callar has very little dialog; besides the brilliant soundtrack music, there is lots of silence. Visually, there are lots of close-ups without establishing shots, odd angles, unexpected cuts, and continually varying lighting, which ranges from Scottish winter gloom to Spanish blinding sunlight, and from flashing neon and disco strobe lights to the fluorescent glare of the supermarket.
The start of the film looked almost Bressonian to me. (Interestingly, in an interview about the film, Ramsay speaks, not of Bresson’s framing and editing, but of his use of sound). But just as the light modulates from scene to scene, so the overall look and feel of the film modulate too. Morvern Callar simply drifts so beautifully, that it is not until a good way through that I realized that it was not in the least about aimlessness and anomie (which is how it seemed at first); rather, it is about escape. Morvern is looking for a way out, and she finds it. Although much of the movie is sad or disturbing, it is really a passionate and affirmative film. Though this affirmation-in-the-face-of-what-might-seem-to-others-as-deprivation is not spiritual in the manner of Bresson, but something even harder to give definition to. Morvern Callar is subtly, but powerfully, subversive, all the more so in that it never gives up its punk blankness and lack of direction, but turns these into positive qualities. What’s so moving about the film, finally, is something that I can only express oxymoronically: the way it gives palpable presence to the most evanescent of feelings, without them ever losing their evanescence.