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
