Shell
Scott Graham (2012)
Writer-director Scott Graham’s first feature has virtually a single set and is essentially a two-hander. The action takes place inside and immediately outside an isolated petrol station in the Scottish Highlands. Shell is the name not of a product on sale at the pumps but of the teenage heroine (Chloe Pirrie), who lives here with her father Pete (Joseph Mawle). Customers are few and far between; Pete also does car repairs or, when the vehicles are beyond repair, breaks them down for scrap metal. Shell’s mother left when the girl was four and Pete is just about the only person in Shell’s life now that she’s left school. The pair are unusually, if not unnaturally, close. This central relationship, the routines of which are minutely observed, is more or less incestuous and it looks to be Shell, rather than Pete, who needs – or, at least, has fewer feelings of guilt about – physical intimacy. Pete returns home after driving a consignment of scrap metal to its destination; his daughter sniffs his clothes and his breath for telltale signs; Pete admits he’s been in the pub but Shell seems jealously suspicious that he may also have the smell of another woman on him. He goes to clean himself up: Shell comes into the bathroom and holds her father as he tries to wash. When the central heating breaks down in the freezing weather, she comes to share his bed.
Pete is distressed by, and discourages, his daughter’s desire for bodily contact with him but he’s no less distressed when he thinks he’s lost Shell. A young mother and her little girl arrive at the petrol station – the mother asks if the child can use the toilet. The girl wanders through to stare at Pete, who’s sitting alone in the kitchen; you sense that he sees in her the image of the infant Shell. When the mother and child drive away, Shell discovers the girl has left her rag doll behind and runs after the car to return it. She goes some way down the road stretching away from the petrol station and Pete is distraught at her disappearance. He appears to try to induce one of the epileptic (or similar) fits to which he’s prone, as if to get her back – and he succeeds. When he’s lying in bed beside her, after the fit has passed, it’s Pete who kisses Shell passionately, and who needs to be reassured by her that she’s not going anywhere. Scott Graham developed Shell from a twenty-minute short of the same name that he made in 2007 but the longer film (unlike Short Term 12, for example) doesn’t feel as if the material is being stretched beyond its natural limits. Concentrating on the interactions of two people in a very particular situation, Graham succeeds in making these absorbing, disturbing and affecting, and his approach isn’t at all judgmental.
Shell and her father both seem to try to interest themselves in other people. It’s possible that Pete did have sex while he was away from home. Shell, after inviting a young man called Adam (Iain de Caestecker), who works in a local sawmill, in to meet her father, goes on a drive with Adam. He’s asked her out before. He now takes the opportunity to have sex with Shell, whether she wants it or not (and she doesn’t), in the back of his car. When Shell, Pete and Adam sit at the three sides of a window table in the house behind the petrol station, you notice that daughter and father drink from matching mugs, with a pattern of blue flowers, while their guest’s mug has a different design. Shell is also a kind of agony aunt for Hugh (Michael Smiley), an older man who calls in for petrol every couple of weeks and tells Shell about his unhappy life as a divorced father of two, and about the weekends he gets to see his kids and which don’t work out. After one of these weekends, he brings Shell a pair of tight-fitting jeans he’s bought for her. She puts them on and flirts pretty blatantly with Hugh until he gets too close. Other visitors include a fortyish couple, Claire (Kate Dickie) and Robert (Paul Thomas Hickey), whose car, on their way back to Edinburgh, collides with a deer and who come to the petrol station after dark, knocking for help.
The mortally wounded deer, whose agony Pete ends by slitting its throat, becomes central to Shell. I’m conscious, writing this, the animal will sound too obvious a symbol of tragic, sensitive innocence and, as might be expected with this kind of material, Scott Graham has been praised for making a ‘poetic’ movie. Yet I think his use of the deer is poetic in the sense that he takes its image, and develops this variously – in ways which seem almost to take him, as well as the viewer, by surprise. You suspect that the deer and Shell will be kindred spirits but the animal, although either young or female (or both), turns out to be at least as much Pete’s familiar. Joseph Mawle’s ability to suggest very naturally in his face the look of a vulnerable animal is a big help in this.
After the sequence in which Pete’s physical love for his daughter becomes evident, a deer wanders around near the petrol station then runs off into the countryside. This turns out to be a dream of Pete’s. Seeming to realise that he can’t live without Shell and she can’t have a life with him, Pete goes out onto the dark road and, standing in the path of a passing lorry, meets his end as the deer did (except that Pete puts himself out of his misery). The beast also seems to represent the complex relationship – weighty, nourishing, unhealthy – between daughter and father. In the sequences involving the deer that was killed, Pete, gasping for breath, lugs its carcass onto a trestle table and skins it as he might strip a car for its metal. Shell gags when she and her father load their freezer with bags of venison and, after cooking some of it, can’t eat the meat (‘It’s like eating my own flesh’). For the most part, Scott Graham interweaves these images so effectively that they transcend the underlying conception (although I could have done without a cut from the flaying of the carcass to a shot of Shell on the toilet wiping menstrual blood from her). The wuthering, bleak landscape and deserted road to nowhere or somewhere beyond the petrol station may be clichés but Graham and his cinematographer Yoliswa Gärtig[1] create some resonant pictures from them – like the figure of Shell running with the doll down the road, or standing as if frozen in it.
Newcomer Chloe Pirrie and Joseph Mawle succeed remarkably in creating a deep intimacy – not just in the obvious sense – between Shell and Pete. I found the occasional visitors’ interests in Shell less easy to accept – why, in particular, the good-looking Adam wouldn’t just find other girls when Shell is reluctant to go out with him. The book that Shell finds in Rob and Claire’s car – Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – is too symbolically apt and Kate Dickie’s Claire gives Shell a parting look that’s too significant (even if I wasn’t sure what it meant). The look of the little girl (Milla Gibson) gawping at Pete is much more expressive. The ending of Shell, after Pete has gone, is mostly unconvincing. Scott Graham, from this point onwards, seems to lose the balance of realism and symbolism which he’s managed skilfully in much of the movie. Her father’s death allows Shell to share a bed with Adam (and he gets Pete’s old mug with his breakfast next morning) but Shell, although distraught when she discovers Pete’s death, looks to get over it quickly – and Adam doesn’t seem to expect her to be traumatised. Finally, Shell – like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (and, more recently, the Paul Dano character in For Ellen) – gets a lift from a lorry driver and departs the petrol station, presumably for good. This is a convenient way of getting her on the road to a new life but, since she’s bound to have that anyway, with Pete no longer there, I couldn’t see the need for an actual escape.
17 November 2013
[1] She is now Yoliswa von Dallwitz.