Monthly Archives: September 2018

  • The Little Stranger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lenny Abrahamson (2018)

    ‘I didn’t set out to write a haunted house novel.  I wanted to write about what happened to class in that post-war setting.  It was a time of turmoil in exciting ways.  Working class people had come out of the war with higher expectations. They had voted in the Labour government.  They want change …. So it was a culture in a state of change.  But obviously for some people it was a change for the worse …

    I wanted the ghost story to be fairly subtle.  The ghost stories that I’ve enjoyed are uncanny, unsettling and eerie more than they are about in-your-face pyrotechnics.  I wanted it to be very based in the social context of the time, but for it to have this extra element of strangeness.’

    This is Sarah Waters, in a piece in the Toronto Star, on writing her novel The Little Stranger (2009).   Lenny Abrahamson’s screen version of the book, with a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, seems well aware of Waters’s intentions.  The film is a serious attempt to integrate social and sexual themes with gothic, supernatural elements, and holds your attention, but it’s increasingly unsatisfying.

    The main action takes place in 1947, with flashbacks to 1919.  The main location is Hundreds Hall, a Georgian manor in rural Warwickshire.  The main character is Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), a bachelor doctor who, in the year before the advent of the NHS, divides his time between general practice and hospital work.  He is called to Hundreds Hall, where a young maidservant, Betty (Liv Hill), is reported to be unwell.  As he approaches the house, Faraday encounters Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter), who had called for him and whose family owns the place.  Roderick has a badly scarred face and moves with difficulty, legacies of the recently ended war, in which he served as an RAF pilot.  An examination of Betty reveals nothing physically wrong.  She admits to Faraday she doesn’t like the draughty, decaying house, where she’s the only member of staff, and was trying to convince people she was ill in order to escape it.  The doctor encourages Caroline (Ruth Wilson), the unmarried daughter of the Ayres family, to make Betty feel more at home.  In the weeks that follow, Faraday (he has no forename) repeatedly returns to the Hall, supervising Roderick’s medical care and enjoying the company of Caroline, whose only obvious emotional attachment is to Gyp, her elderly black Labrador retriever.  In voiceover that announces the flashbacks, Faraday also recalls visiting Hundreds Hall once before, when he was nine years old.  The Hall hosted an Empire Day party, the year after the Great War ended, for the local villagers.  Faraday, the only child of working-class parents, attended in the company of his mother, who had once been a servant at the Hall.

    From this opening, Lenny Abrahamson develops the film’s central relationship between Faraday and Caroline; illustrates the doctor’s continuing acute awareness of his humble social origins, as well as the economic and political climate in which the financially straitened Ayres sell the land surrounding Hundreds Hall for a housing development; and introduces the story’s ‘haunted house’ aspect.   The last includes (inter alia) Roderick’s growing terror of a supernatural force he perceives to be active in the Hall and which hates him; servants’ bells that ring of their own accord;  marks appearing on a skirting board; similarly puzzling, childish writing of the name ‘Suki’ on the walls of a deserted nursery upstairs.  Faraday offers the family rational explanations as best he can:  the marks and writing, for example, must have been there for years and never noticed before.   His medical skills and his reassurances are not enough.  Roderick becomes disturbed enough to be committed to a mental institution.  The Ayres materfamilias Angela (Charlotte Rampling) is convinced that her long-dead daughter Susan, who was known as Suki, is communicating from beyond the grave.

    Things reach a point where Faraday himself, as he confides to another doctor, is starting to wonder what’s going on.  He speculates that what is known as poltergeist activity could actually be generated by a living person, when that person’s shadow side – their irrational desires and impulses – operate outside conscious control and as if autonomously.   The flashbacks suggest that something of this kind may have happened when the boy Faraday (Oliver Zetterström) was briefly left to his own devices in Hundreds Hall.  The meek-looking child, with sudden energy, breaks off an ornamental acorn from the frame of a grand mirror at the foot of the staircase.  When his mother reappears and discovers what he’s done, she slaps her son hard and calls him a ‘vandal’.   The title of the film gradually assumes a double meaning.  It may refer to the weird force at work in the house, perhaps generated by the dead little girl.   It could also apply to the young boy who, on Empire Day, entered a place where he didn’t belong – who was allowed inside Hundreds Hall only because one of her former colleagues among the staff there recognised Mrs Faraday, inviting her and her son into the kitchens.  That young boy has become a man who, in spite of social elevation through professional success, still feels the stigma of his start in life.  The quiet condescension shown towards him by characters like Angela Ayres and even his affable medical practice partner Granger (Harry Hadden-Patton) suggests Faraday may not be imagining that he’s still regarded as one of the lower orders.

    Faraday is the first-person narrator of Sarah Waters’s novel.  In spite of his voiceover and appearance in nearly each scene, not everything in the film reflects the doctor’s point of view or is mediated through him.  This contributes, along with conventionally presented paranormal activity, to why the ghost story is not, as Waters meant it to be, ‘fairly subtle’.  When, for example, Angela finds herself trapped in the spooky nursery, it’s hard to interpret the maelstrom she experiences as a product of her mind:  she’s on the receiving end of standard poltergeist behaviour on screen.  A more persistent problem is the cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland’s gloomy images of the house, inside and out.  Apart from making some bits hard to make out at all, the bleak lighting, by throwing a pall over the place from the start, denudes it of mystery.  Hundreds Hall is a million miles away from Bly in The Innocents.

    Even so, in the early stages the rationing of incidents that seem explicable yet inexplicable is effective.  Making an unusual attempt to socialise, the Ayreses invite a few people to dinner.  Faraday is one of the guests, although he has to sing for his supper:  when Roderick fails to appear, Faraday is instructed to make him change his mind.  The doctor finds him in his room, drunkenly insisting that something bad will happen if he joins the company.  The other guests include a young couple and their annoying, precocious daughter, who insists on playing with the good-natured Gyp.  The moment when the dog, quite out of character, savages the child is genuinely shocking.   As the film goes on, though, Lenny Abrahamson’s unimaginative realisation of the uncanny becomes a drag on his more interesting account of Faraday’s and Caroline’s doomed romance.

    A main reason why it’s doomed is evident from Caroline’s behaviour when she and Faraday go to a dance together.  Her promising career in the women’s army was cut short when Caroline was summoned home by her mother to look after Roderick.  When someone she knew in the army unexpectedly appears, Caroline is instantly transformed – animated and laughing, both on and off the dance floor, where she partners the other young woman.  ‘Nice to see Caroline out and enjoying herself,’ observes Granger to Faraday.   On the way home, Faraday tries to make love to Caroline.  Before long, she has scrambled out of the car and is running towards Hundreds Hall.  Although she later agrees to marry him, it’s clear her heart’s not in it and she breaks off their engagement.  It may be a fair reflection of the historical setting that Dr Granger’s remark at the dance is as close anyone in the film comes to voicing the word lesbian.

    In the home straight, Abrahamson’s approach is half-hearted.  Excitement remains in short supply but the director feels the pressure to explain things pyrotechnically, even while keeping them officially ambiguous.  Waters’s socio-political themes have been virtually jettisoned but now, other than in the film’s ever-increasing implication that screwed-up Faraday is the source of the problems at Hundreds Hall.   (The Suki side of things is, in effect, closed down by Angela Ayres’s suicide.)  The climax takes place late at night, when Caroline is woken by the sound of repeated, rhythmical knocking; at the same time, Faraday, distraught at her rejection of him, sits in his car a little way from the house, compulsively (and rhythmically) beating against the upholstery.  Caroline, moving from her bedroom onto the second-floor landing, appears to be drawn towards the source of the knocking.  She stares at something, murmurs ‘You …’ and falls backward over the banister, to her death.

    As in last year’s Goodbye Christopher Robin, Domhnall Gleeson gives an ambitious and unsuccessful performance.  He again eschews obvious emotionality.  The result is inexpressiveness, except that Faraday seems so miserable it’s incredible no one advises him to see a doctor.  Although he’s actually about the right age, Gleeson also seems a bit young for the role – at any rate, he doesn’t come across as a man old enough to be already despairing of finding someone to relieve his isolation.  Will Poulter plays Roderick intelligently but he too gives the impression, under his heavy scar-tissue make-up, of being too young.  In her early scenes, Charlotte Rampling easily suggests a woman to whom there’s more than meets the eye but she doesn’t engage strongly with Angela’s increasing obsession.  The best acting comes from Ruth Wilson, who gets inside the skin of the unhappy Caroline, by turns impatiently sarcastic and regretfullyt grateful to Faraday; and from Liv Hill, excellent and remarkably natural as Betty.  The supple score is by Stephen Rennicks.

    27 September 2018

  • Morvern Callar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lynne Ramsay (2002)

    Every so often, someone from BFI’s ‘Futures’ initiative pops up at a screening to invite those in the audience aged twenty-five or under to attend a discussion of the film afterwards.  In one recent instance, a show of hands beforehand revealed unfortunately few eligible audience members but that wasn’t a problem at Morvern Callar.  Matt somebody, from the ‘Futures’ steering group, enlarged the usual invitation with advice on how to watch Lynne Ramsay’s film.  He informed us that the title character, who works in a supermarket, hadn’t previously been considered in terms of her social class.  This, said Matt, was because of Ramsay’s trademark ‘poetic aesthetic’ and the perceived similarity of her work to that of the German writer-director Angela Schanelec, which ‘often features middle-class characters’.  Matt wanted people, young ones anyway, to compare and contrast their ‘empathy’ with a working-class character like Morvern with what they would feel about a middle-class character, though he didn’t specify what kind of middle-class character he had in mind.  Or explain, if Ramsay’s protagonist has been viewed purely as an element in her ‘poetic aesthetic’, how BFI came to be showing Morvern Callar in their ‘Working Class Heroes’ season (alongside Billy Liar, Charlie Bubbles, Poor Cow, and so on).

    Matt didn’t convince me ‘Futures’ is in safe hands but what he said about Lynne Ramsay’s aesthetic and about empathy are certainly relevant to watching her films.  Ramsay’s priorities are ingenious image-making and sound design to the extent that she creates a considerable emotional distance between the viewer and the people on the screen.  Her characters aren’t necessarily alienating but the effect of Ramsay’s artfulness is to eclipse them.  She has made four features, of which I’ve now seen three (I’m still missing the first, Ratcatcher).  I can’t offhand think of another current director in whose work people are more clearly subordinate to the visual scheme in which she (or he) places them.  Except that Ramsay also has a knack – probably the wrong word:  this must be calculated – of casting a lead actor strong enough to break through, at least intermittently, her barrier of technique:  Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here (2017), Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar.

    Like both her subsequent features, this one is adapted from someone else’s novel.  Ramsay shares the screenplay credit with Liana Dognini.  In the original Morvern Callar (Alan Warner’s debut novel), the heroine is Scottish.  In the film, she’s English:  in a phone conversation early on, Morton’s Morvern acknowledges that she’s not a local but has lived for some years in the Scottish town where the story is primarily set.  She has (from what I could hear) no backstory beyond this.

    Morvern wakes on Christmas morning to find that her boyfriend James has killed himself.  In the note left on his computer screen, he says suicide seemed to make sense and tells Morvern that he loves her.  He asks her to make funeral arrangements:  there’s enough money in his bank account.  He also bequeaths the manuscript of a novel he’s written, along with instructions to Morvern to send it to publishers in a prescribed order.  Instead of organising a funeral, Morvern cuts up and buries James’s body.  (No one seems to miss him anyway.)  She erases ‘James Gillespie’ from the first page of the manuscript and replaces it with her own name, before sending the novel to the first publisher on James’s list.  There’s approaching four thousand pounds in his bank account.  Morvern quits her job stacking supermarket shelves and arranges a holiday with her friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) on the Costa del Sol.  Shortly before leaving for Spain, Morvern receives a letter:  the firm she sent ‘her’ book to wants to publish it.

    Talk about beginner’s luck.  Morvern Callar, in other words, is not a realistic story, even though Lynne Ramsay sets it in a physically real (and bleak) world and Matt’s introduction mentioned that Morvern had ‘to deal with grief from the outset’.  It’s difficult to interpret her behaviour as an expression of grief not just because the grieving takes such an unconventional form but also thanks to the dominance and distraction of Ramsay’s visual effects.  It was a particular difficulty for this viewer that among the most salient of these are the Christmas tree lights that keep flickering off and on (and on and on) beside James’s corpse.  With plenty of later sequences in strobe-lit clubs, in both Scotland and Spain, I admit I missed a fair part of Morvern Callar shielding my eyes.  But not enough to avoid finding the film boring:  even though Ramsay’s compositions are extraordinary (the DP is Alwin H Küchler), her way of working is predictable enough to nullify this.  Morvern says to Lanna, ‘Let’s bake!’  What she really means is:  let’s bake but first shower ourselves in flour so that we’re suitably eye-catching.

    Throughout all this, Samantha Morton, while in no position to create a character, is an intriguing presence.  Once the action shifts to Spain and the locations there change relatively quickly, Morvern experiences a sense of freedom and so does the actress playing her.  The publishers are so keen to recruit Morvern that they hotfoot it to Almeria to talk terms with her.  The interview that follows is mildly enjoyable comedy (‘It’s great to read a novel with a distinctive new female voice …’).  Morvern leaves Lanna stranded somewhere in the mountains but there’s no hard feelings on the latter’s part once she’s made her own way back to Scotland.  The post awaiting Morvern there includes a £100,000 cheque from the publishers as an advance on the novel.  She decides to leave town and urges Lanna to come too, though she already knows her friend lacks her sense of adventure.  The film ends with a beautiful shot of Morvern alone on a railway platform, about to board the train that will take her into a new world.

    As might be expected, Morvern Callar is:

    ‘… an interesting film from a feminist perspective, not simply because it is directed and written by women and has two female protagonists, but more so, because the main female character is not judged or punished for her transgressions … Morvern Callar overturns this dynamic and explores the possibility of an ethics beyond judgment. Morvern’s affective, tactile and sensory way of experiencing the world articulates an idea of life as experimental and open to the new rather than contained and restricted by fixed transcendent codes and rules.  By aligning the film-viewer with Morvern’s affective and tactile way of experiencing the world it introduce [sic] us to an immanent ethics and aesthetics that avoids moral judgments and relates to idea [sic] of life as open and vital.’

    That’s what Teresa Rizzo, an Honorary Associate and researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, says anyway.   She’s probably right but I didn’t feel aligned to Morvern’s etc etc.   The world I was experiencing was the world of a Lynne Ramsay film.  And a Lynne Ramsay film is The Lynne Ramsay Show.

    25 September 2018

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