Movie: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
What if the elephant in the room would actually go away if you'd simply ignore it? When Morvern's (Samantha Morton) boyfriend commits suicide, she doesn't tell anyone and lets the body rot on the floor as a minor nuisance (leading to some morbidly funny moments) for weeks until she buries it anonymoulsy in a faraway field. With her still unprocessed grief, she then decides to take her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) on a wildly irresponsible holiday, while also passing off her boyfriend's just finished novel as her own. Every decision she makes is misguided and the consequence of her refusal to acknowledge and address the shitty situation she's found herself in. And yet, she ends the film in a far better emotional, psychological and financial state than she began it.
The offbeat framing, sound design and lighting choices Ramsay makes, for a long time conceal the truly eccentric elements of the film, until everything finally sinks in at the end. Morvern Callar shares certain commonalities with revenge movies that use the death of a loved one as starting points for violent wish fulfilment fantasies. The fantasy here is not violent (though it could be seen as revenge on the 'killer'), but is more relatable, which perhaps also makes it more uncomfortable. Yes, we can imagine how we would feel if someone would kill a loved one, and we can imagine how satisfying it could be to go on a vengeful killing spree in response. But that's not a thing that would happen to most of us, nor would we necessarily be able and willing to respond to it like the Uma Thurmans and Charles Bronsons of the world. But we have all at some point in our lives wished to ignore, and choose the easy way out of, an uncomfortable situation, behaving in somewhat irresponsible ways in the hope that it would simply disappear. Morton's Morvern does just that and becomes cooler by the minute, ending the film sipping whyskis in a bar with an air of world-beating confidence that's hard to reconcile with the mousy detached girl we saw at the beginning.
It's an ending that makes sense, as this is not a film primarily about Morvern's grief, but about her attittude, and the way she responds to men and music, and to her friends and her surroundings. Ramsay wants us to be aware of these surroundings, and fills the film with music, sounds, unusual lighting sources and interesting sights, all of which she tries to present from different perspectives. A great example are the flickering lights of Morvern's Christmas three in her living room; Ramsay has gone to great lengths to ensure that these lights are in some way 'present' in every shot of Morvern in her apartment, and that their effect is always slightly different depending on Morvern's location in the apartment. Also worth mentioning are the slightly surrealist touches Ramsay gives to the Spanish village procession. The sequence is given a different, hazier look from the rest of the film, and alternates between the point of view of Morvern and Lanna, who see and hear the same things, but seemingly experience them differently. It's wonderful to see how well executed and complex most of Ramsay's shots are, although that does also make it more noticeable when certain shots and scenes are just thoughtlessly stylized artistic flourishes that don't make much sense in or out of context. That is in particular true for anything involving the publishers, but is in general much less a problem here than in Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin.
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