Carol Morley (2014)
A high, unaccompanied voice sings a song about the moon. A beautiful, self-consciously elaborate image, of an enormous tree and its reflection in water, appears. A girl’s voice reads the opening lines of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. Some cinéaste spirits will soar – along with hopes for plenty more placed, cultured allusions in what’s to follow – at this, the start of Carol Morley’s The Falling. It made my heart sink. I’ve seen none of Morley’s previous films but most have been shorts and The Falling, as a thirty- or forty-minute piece, might be ingenious and amusing. At feature length, its tired ideas, thin atmosphere and obvious characters make it ludicrous – in spite of some good people in the cast, who keep you watching.
The Falling is set largely in a girls’ secondary school in England. Lydia (Maisie Williams) and Abbie (Florence Pugh) are best friends. It’s a familiar screen friendship: the two girls carve their names on the bark of a tree (the great oak overhanging the lake that was seen at the start) and agree to commemorate the event each year. Short, dark Lydia may be infatuated with golden, willlowy Abbie – and is concerned too because her friend is becoming sexually promiscuous with boys. Abbie may be pregnant when she dies suddenly, after suffering some kind of seizure. It’s the shock of this sudden death and loss that seems to trigger Lydia’s increasingly frequent fainting fits. This ‘falling’ – which connotes the loss of female chastity, as well as Wordsworth’s theme of vanishing prelapsarian experience – spreads through the girls in the school. The Falling is set in 1969: Carol Morley doesn’t make the date explicit but at one point a black and white television set is showing a Panorama programme, with Robin Day introducing Julian Pettifer’s report about the Apollo 11 moon landing. This is a pre-feminist world – or, at least, an England in which the Women’s Liberation Movement hadn’t yet taken off. Lydia’s mother Eileen (Maxine Peake), with whom her daughter has a fraught relationship, is a hairdresser. Eileen has a beehive coiffure and appears to favour giving others the same style, derided by Lydia as laughably old-fashioned. These customers come to the family home, which Eileen never steps outside of. (She is so benighted a woman that she not only has a self-inflicted anachronistic hairdo; she’s also agoraphobic.) The mother’s inhibited existence complements the daughter’s refusal, implied in her fainting tendencies, to engage with the real world and its irresistible forces of sex and death.
The school authorities, alarmed by the anarchic implications of the fainting mania that Lydia has started, call in a psychiatrist (Simon Paisley Day) to investigate. In her interview with him, Lydia displays a sparky, contemptuous resistance to his attempts to find an explanation of what is going on. (Lydia later claims that she feigned her faints; this surprises the other girls, who have fallen involuntarily.) It’s a bit rich that Carol Morley, to bring her story to a climax and conclusion, has to rely on an explanation less imaginative than the ‘hysterical contagion’ diagnosed by the psychiatrist. Eileen discovers her son Kenneth (Joe Cole) having sex with Lydia and throws him out of the house. In the showdown that follows, Eileen tells Lydia that she was conceived through an act of rape – by a man who wasn’t the husband that walked out on the family years ago. The revelation causes Lydia to climb high into the oak tree from which she falls into the lake.
What looks at first to be an act of suicide turns out to be – or so the closing weeping embrace of mother and daughter suggests – Lydia’s putting away of childish things and a kind of exorcism of Abbie. The film has included other lunar details (perhaps even the choice of Panorama report was significant!) but, as The Falling ends, the unaccompanied menstrual song of the opening returns to the soundtrack and the moon appears in the sky above the oak tree. The score for the film is by Tracey Thorn (from Everything but the Girl). One of Abbie’s achievements in the school is to form an alternative orchestra; when they play, there’s a repeated sound very like a mobile phone going off and its effect is disorienting. (Your first thought is that it’s someone in the cinema audience, your second that it’s an anachronism in the film.)
The revelation of Lydia’s true identity is not a surprise – not least because Maisie Williams doesn’t look like anyone’s child: a combination of changeling and a child in a Victorian book of scraps, she’s an absorbing camera subject. She often brings a welcome humour to the role, especially in Lydia’s interview with the psychiatrist and in the movement of her right eye – half-tic, half-wink – which seems to be linked with the impressions of subliminal thought that Chris Wyatt’s clever cutting creates. Maxine Peake gives a disciplined performance as Eileen, at least until the closing stages, and Joe Cole does well as Kenneth. (I didn’t understand whether or not he knew the secret of Lydia’s parentage, which softens somewhat the incestuous nature of their physical relationship.) The most interesting characterisations, however, are provided by actors playing members of the school staff. Greta Scacchi rather overdoes the harsh disciplinarian side of the apparently spinsterish Miss Mantel but the deep-seated melancholy in her face is eloquent. Mathew Baynton plays Mr Hopkins, the self-confident, randy science teacher, with comic precision: he exudes, effortlessly and objectionably, Hopkins’s feelings of superiority to his mainly single female colleagues. When the young art teacher (Morfydd Clark) needs a sympathetic word, Hopkins, a married man, kisses her on the lips.
Best of all is Monica Dolan as the chain-smoking headmistress Miss Alvaro. Dolan gradually discloses Miss Alvaro’s unease and dissatisfaction and the effort it takes for her to retain her surface poise. As usual, Dolan is very witty. You sympathise with Miss Alvaro when she finds Lydia’s repeated fainting tiresome and the best exchange in The Falling is between Miss Alvaro and Miss Mantel, when the psychiatrist’s report on the falling frenzy has been delivered. After reminding Miss Mantel of the Greek derivation of the word ‘hysterical’, Miss Alvaro remarks, with a bitter laugh, that the schoolgirls’ generation ‘think they’re so misunderstood – if they were middle-aged women they’d know what that really means’. Having made this rare, sort-of joke, she continues to laugh and can’t stop – until you can’t tell if she’s crying too. This laughter and tears confusion sounds (and is) familiar but Monica Dolan realises Miss Alvaro’s still somewhat suppressed hysteria compellingly. One of the most striking and curious features of the story is that the only girl in the school who is not affected by the fainting epidemic is also the only one who appears to be of mixed race.
27 April 2015
