Helen
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (2008)
A teenage girl called Joy Thompson disappears. She had everything to live for – a secure home with loving parents and a steady boyfriend; she was doing well at school. (She also had an unusual name for a girl born around 1990. Her parents must have recognised its symbolic potential.) The police choose Helen, a contemporary from the same sixth form college, to play Joy in a reconstruction of her last known movements. Joy was wearing a yellow leather jacket when she disappeared and, once Helen puts on an identical jacket, she’s rarely seen without it. She wants a relationship with Joy’s boyfriend Danny. She insinuates herself into Joy’s parents’ home. The identity theft idea may not be original but it’s not uninteresting. If the filmmakers suggested convincingly not only why Helen wanted to become Joy but why Joy’s parents and boyfriend were at some level willing to let this happen, it might be compelling. Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor make no attempt to do this. We quickly get the message that Helen ‘wants to be someone else’ because her life is unhappy. She was brought up in care and, approaching her eighteenth birthday, appears to have neither friends nor family. When Helen asks Danny if he loved Joy, he says that he liked her and might have grown to love her; we have no idea why he appears to acquiesce so easily to Helen’s desire to be his lover. (Whether they actually sleep together is not made clear: we see them sitting side by side, fully clothed, on a bed in the hotel where Helen has a part-time job as a chambermaid.) Joy’s parents welcome Helen into their home for no better reason than they’ve lost their daughter. There’s no indication that their relationship with Joy was in any way unhappy. Neither Danny nor the parents question the fact that Helen wears the yellow jacket nearly continuously or suggest that her doing so is odd or insensitive.
The opening sequence shows Joy (in long shot – we never see her face) parting from a group of girlfriends in a park and walking off into a wooded area from which she never re-emerges. The camera movements are almost hypnotically slow and deliberate but you immediately wonder how things will develop once the characters start to interact and the story moves forward. When Molloy and Lawlor cut to police combing the area, one of the policemen seems to be acting suspiciously. He conducts a nervous call on his mobile with one furtive eye on what his colleagues are doing. This bit has stuck in my mind for two reasons. First, because the actor playing the policeman – although what he was doing seemed obvious – was pretty convincing; by the end of the film, very few of the other performers had come close to this level of accomplishment. (I can’t work out from the BFI note’s credits list the name of the man playing the policeman.) Second, because this was the one moment when the audience was encouraged to feel we were watching a conventional crime story. We assess the behaviour of the furtive policeman wondering if he has something to do with Joy’s disappearance. In retrospect, this moment seems like a red herring: Molloy and Lawlor are not making a whodunit. But, since this is just about the only scene in the picture that concentrates on someone who isn’t linked to the main narrative, it’s as if they want us to be unsure what kind of film we might be in for.
If this is a deliberate ploy, it’s a pointless one: from the next scene, when a detective meets with Joy’s parents, it’s very clear that Molloy and Lawlor are uninterested not only in the police procedural aspect of the material but in dramatising human behaviour believably. The police have quickly found clothing and possessions in the area where Joy disappeared: the yellow jacket, a handbag, a purse, a notebook. The detective presents these objects, each sealed in a plastic bag as you’d expect, to Mr and Mrs Thompson and asks them to identify them as their daughter’s. Mr Thompson confirms that the notebook and the purse are Joy’s: it’s very odd that a father would know instantly what his teenage daughter’s purse and notebook looked like (especially ones as undistinctive as these); but this implausibility is immediately upstaged by Mrs Thompson’s asking if she can touch the jacket which she has identified as Joy’s (the father might have recognised that one). The detective removes the jacket from its protective wrapping and the mother buries her face in it.
The sequence in the police station also introduces Helen‘s prevailing acting style. When the characters begin to speak, you’re led to expect playing of a kind familiar in independent cinema where the cast are non-professionals and the director thinks that is conducive to authenticity: if they speak in dreary, flat voices they will be more ‘real’ than if they were actors trained to point their lines. But it soon becomes clear that the bad acting in Helen is something different. Although the voices are certainly dull and uninflected, the actors seem to be aiming for conventional histrionics. Their attempts are mostly hopeless yet the BFI note – which includes two excerpts from a recent Sight and Sound, a review of Helen by Roger Clarke and an interview with Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor – suggests that the ineptness of the performances is supposed to add to the fascination. Clarke reports that ‘No effort is made to draw naturalistic performances from the non-professional actors’. Molloy and Lawlor, who have been ‘working on and off with community groups for over 20 years’, are more expansive:
‘… on the one hand, we deliberately strive for the high production values of big budget mainstream films by making use of 35mm CinemaScope, while on the other hand we use ordinary, real people from the community – non-professionals – who we then immerse in this stylised cinematic world. What emerges is a sort of authenticity that arises from the rawness of the performances, counteracted by the slickness of the production values. We like this tension – it’s what has drawn us to working with community groups. The flawed, imperfect nature of the films, we hope, is the very quality that opens up a space for the audience. …’
I assume from this that Molloy and Lawlor want the audience to remain aware that the people we see in Helen are non-actors but this clearly raises plenty of questions. (The performances are ‘raw’ only in the sense that they’re lacking accomplishment; they’re not ‘raw’ in the sense of fresh because the performers seem to want to come over like actors in a soap.) Do the ‘ordinary, real people’ chosen for Helen realise that the whole point is that they shouldn’t be convincing in their roles? Did the filmmakers compliment the cast on being no good at inhabiting their fictional characters, explaining that their lack of expressive skill is the key to retaining their ordinariness and reality? Did the cast feel fulfilled as a result? Why did Molloy and Lawlor choose a potentially emotive dramatic situation – in which the audience would expect to feel sympathy for the unhappy girl at the centre of the story and the parents of a daughter who had vanished and probably been murdered? Are we really supposed not to care about these people but to be fascinated instead by the discrepancy between the clinical polish of the settings and the unlovely non-actors stuck in them? The aesthetic Molloy and Lawlor claim to be trying to achieve is revealed as phony as soon as they talk about the main character:
‘Our cast for Helen came entirely from within the local community. As with all our ‘Civic Life’ films, by and large, whoever turns up on the day is in the film. The exception to this is how we cast the role of Helen – we couldn’t just take the first young woman that came our way and give her the part. In the end, we struggled to get anyone even close to what we needed. Time was very quickly running out, so we considered a professional actress for the part – and might well have cast her [if we had lacked] the tough skin that many years hanging from the cliff ledge has given us.’
If Molloy and Lawlor are aiming for ‘a sort of authenticity that arises from the rawness of the performances’ why didn’t they cast as Helen ‘the first young woman that came our way’? If they had, they would surely have been truer to their professed artistic pretensions and they might have achieved more consistent ineptitude – which they get, in spades, from, among others, Denis Jobling (Mr Thompson), Sonia Saville (the police officer who ‘auditions’ the kids for the reconstruction), Danny Groenland (Danny), Eddie Hardy (a careers teacher), Gavin Huscroft (a drama teacher), and Sheila Hamilton and Betty Ashe (respectively Helen’s key worker and personal adviser in social services). As it is, Annie Townsend as Helen, although she’s been encouraged to be monotonous, is incongruously competent. The only other cast member of whom this can be said (apart from that dodgy policeman) is Sandie Malia, in spite of the fact that what she’s asked to do as Mrs Thompson is, even by the standards of this film, exceptionally silly. (Nearly making love to her daughter’s yellow jacket at the police station is only the start.) Just about the only sequence in Helen that’s dramatically alive is conventional and non-visual, when we hear Mrs Thompson’s broadcast appeal for her daughter to come home or her abductor to return her safely.
It’s often hard not to laugh (especially in the reverent hush of the BFI Studio). The high point has to be when Helen goes for a meal with Joy’s parents. In one of the brief breaks in the pregnant silence, Mrs Thompson says, ‘Can I ask you a question, Helen?’ as if the fate of nations depended on it. ‘Yes,’ replies Helen. ‘Do you like wine?’ asks Mrs Thompson. The mother doesn’t touch her food and her husband gets too upset to eat. Helen moves bits of pasta around her plate without a morsel passing her lips. ‘Do you like your food, Helen?’ asks Mr Thompson, when he’s recovered his composure. ‘Yes,’ says Helen, ‘it’s good’. You long for the father then to say, ‘Why not eat it then?’ Instead, Mrs Thompson asks Helen another probing question – ‘Do you like the creative subjects at school?’ Helen says no – she prefers sport. (It would be manna from heaven to have a scene, however brief, of her actually preferring sport – or enjoying anything.) But Helen then adds that her class is currently doing a musical play. ‘Oh, yes,’ says Mrs Thompson, ‘Brigadoon, isn’t it?’ And it really is. Cut to a rehearsal. The drama teacher tells the class he’s written some notes, which I assumed would be post-rehearsal notes for the cast but turn out to be a little essay on the themes of Brigadoon. (If the story of the mysterious Scottish village that comes to life only one day in every hundred years has some resonance with the themes of Helen this was lost on me.) As the teacher delivers his awkward reading, the kids in the class stand frozen in unnatural poses and with vacant faces. Then they start rehearsing and the teacher delivers one of the script’s best worst lines: ‘That’s good – don’t lose the feeling,’ he says. Helen’s life may be empty but she certainly has plenty in her diary. As well as school, shifts at the hotel, her social life with the Thompsons and Danny, and Brigadoon, she says at one point that she’s doing ‘a few rehearsals’ for the reconstruction. How many rehearsals does that entail? As far as I could tell, the reconstruction never takes place (nor, alas, does the class’s performance of Brigadoon).
As realistic drama, the film is ludicrous but Molloy and Lawlor would presumably say that to judge it as such is to miss the point of what they’re doing. Their approach in effect gives them carte blanche: if something is unconvincing in realistic terms they can say they were aiming for something deeper than realism – and there are moments when that becomes nearly explicit. In the final sequence, when one of the social services people tells Helen about her parents (now that she’s eighteen she’s entitled to know this), we watch the two women sitting at a table and several seconds pass before the older woman speaks. The camera is some way away from the women; they’re not expressing anything. In other words, we seem to be invited to observe the woman playing the social worker, whom we’ve not seen before, in the moments before she begins to act (as it were). Perhaps this is an example of the ‘quality that opens up a space for the audience’. But what does it illustrate? Molloy’s and Lawlor’s aesthetic seems designed for an audience that doesn’t understand the concept of acting (that the person playing a role is ultimately distinct from the person he or she is pretending to be).
The pivotal theme of identity comes in very handy of course. When the police are selecting kids to play Joy and Danny in the reconstruction, the policewoman in charge of proceedings says that Helen and a boy called John are the best look-alikes. No one ever says to Helen subsequently that she resembles Joy (granted it’s rare enough that anyone speaks to her at all). Helen tells the real Danny that the boy chosen to play him looks nothing like him (and she’s right). So who’s blind – the policewoman in spotting resemblances or Helen and/or Danny and/or Joy’s parents (and/or the audience) in not spotting them? This makes no sense at all but it’s the kind of nonsense Sight and Sound reviewers get excited by because they can say that it raises essential questions about identity: do any of us really know who we and who other people really are? Roger Clarke in his Sight and Sound piece is right that a ‘lot of attention is paid to colour’ but it seems to be purely pictorial attention. (It’s striking when we see Helen wearing the yellow jacket over the bright red skirt of her hotel uniform but it’s no more than visually striking.) The closing line of Clarke’s review beats anything in the Molloy-Lawlor screenplay for inadvertent comedy:
‘But the hyperreal formalism and aesthetics of Helen are radical and inspiring – seen on the biggest screen available, it is hard not to walk away from this film with the feeling something very special indeed has just happened.’
20 August 2009