Last week, I kicked off
the New Cult Canon column with Donnie Darko, which I called a
quintessential cult movie, one that has accumulated a large, passionate
following through midnight showings and DVD, even though it tanked in general
release. But that isn't the only criteria I'll be using to define a cult movie
over the weeks and months (and years?) I'll be rolling out this project.
Phenomena like Donnie Darko are rare, and in that particular case, almost
anomalous; far more common are movies with a cult sensibility, offbeat visions that are
pointedly removed from the mainstream, often willfully bizarre, and, for lack
of a better word, "cool." The "Cinema Of Cool"—a term Jeff Dawson coined in
a book he wrote about Quentin Tarantino—applies to many of the filmmakers
I'll be covering in this column; for this new generation, style matters, as
does the sheer sensual pleasure the movies have to offer.
Lynne Ramsay's 2002 film Morvern
Callar
was the inspiration for this column, because for all its bleakness and
deliberate frustrations, I can think of no cooler movie. It's a wonder that
theaters didn't have doormen standing behind velvet ropes, determining who was
hip enough to step into its world of enveloping disaffection. Based on Alan
Warner's novel, which was part of a brief flowering of Scottish literature in
the wake of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, the film is an adaptation with a high
degree of difficulty. It's one thing to adapt someone like James M. Cain, whose
steamroller plots are action-packed and give off a lot of surface heat; it's
another to capture a character's internal life, which is usually the exclusive
province of novels. Working with a plot that could fit comfortably on a
cocktail napkin, Ramsay has to rely almost entirely on cinematic
effects—and Samantha Morton's revelatory performance—to decipher a
woman who's so deep in an existential funk that her behavior is always curious
and sometimes extraordinarily callous.
Before getting into the
movie itself, a few words on Ramsay: To my mind, Lynne Ramsay is one of the
most talented filmmakers in the world, even though she only has two features to
her credit, and nothing since Morvern Callar. Ramsay has a background
in photography, and in her movies, it's clear that she's a photographer first
and foremost. Each frame is immaculately composed, and unusually focused on the
minute details that are more characteristic of photographers than film
directors, who are usually concerned with the bigger picture. After making a
series of acclaimed short films, Ramsay shot her stunning 1999 debut Ratcatcher, which might have been
another piece of UK kitchen-sink miserablism if not for Ramsay's extraordinary
eye for finding poetry in the everyday. (Incidentally, three of Ramsay's shorts
are collected as bonus features on Criterion's Ratcatcher DVD.) Though Ratcatcher wallows in the horrific
world of its 12-year-old protagonist—a Glaswegian apartment-dweller in
the early '70s who lives in the stinking squalor of a garbage strike—it
nonetheless has moments of real beauty. As I said in my review of the DVD, "Just
when Ratcatcher
seems overly content to bathe in Euro-art squalor, Ramsay counters with
passages so breathtakingly lyrical and improbably optimistic that they shake
off the oppressive pall that too often passes for hard realism."
In recent years, Ramsay
has suffered some discouragement in getting her third film to the screen. She
won the rights to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones while it was still an
unpublished manuscript, and watched it slip away from her as the book became an
unexpected phenomenon. True to form, Ramsay reportedly loved the grim premise
for the book—about a little girl who's raped and killed, and then watches
the aftermath from heaven—but disliked its second half, which she found
too sentimental. She worked for more than a year to craft a screenplay more to
her liking, but the rights eventually went to the all-powerful Peter Jackson,
who's currently filming it for release next year. Ramsay was later attached to
direct an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver's brilliant book about a
mother grappling with her son's Columbine-like rampage. To me, it sounds like
the ideal fit, but that project appears to have died on the vine, since I've
heard nothing on it since 2006. So for now, there's only Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, and hopefully a young
filmmaker who isn't too discouraged to keep pushing new boulders up a hill.
For High Fidelity types like myself, the
mix-tape has always been an important (if somewhat feeble) form of romantic
expression, the pop-damaged equivalent of sending a bouquet of flowers. And Morvern
Callar
features the mix-tape to end all mix-tapes, with tracks from bands like The
Velvet Underground, Can, Boards Of Canada, Broadcast, and Aphex Twin, among
others. Morton's eponymous heroine receives her mix-tape in the cruelest
fashion: As one in a series of Christmas gifts given by a boyfriend who has
just committed suicide. (She also receives a leather jacket, a Walkman, and a
lighter.)
As the film opens, Morvern
is curled up on the floor next to her boyfriend's corpse, with Christmas lights
pulsing like a disco around them. He's left her a note on her computer screen:
He apologizes. He tells her he loves her. He encourages her to "be brave." He
also leaves behind a completed novel and a list of possible publishers to
solicit, as well as his ATM card for money to pay for the funeral. Clearly
bruised by her boyfriend's cruel departure, Morvern doesn't follow through on
the dead man's wishes, to put it mildly. She changes the byline on the novel to
her name, and rather than using the cash from his bank account for a funeral,
she buys tickets for her and her party-animal friend (and supermarket co-worker)
Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) to vacation in Spain. Here's what she does with the
body (this clip is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, so tread carefully):
Take that, Juno! After boozing it up in
their native Fort Williams—and after Morvern disposes of the body and cleans up
her apartment with toilet paper and air freshener—the two woman head to
Spain, where the film's visual palette changes completely. Gone is the gray
pallor of Scotland, replaced by sunny Ibiza, where other young tourists have
flocked for a spring break right out of MTV. Lanna is enthusiastic about the
all-night drinking and random hookups, but Morvern seems driven deeper into a
funk, and demands they leave for the countryside. As they make their way to
Pamplona, where they come upon the "running of the bulls" almost by
happenstance, the clouds seem to part a little for Morvern. (Lanna, on the
other hand, can't understand why they're stuck in the "middle of nowhere.") Morvern
even has a hilarious meet-and-greet with two enthusiastic publishers, who are
incapable of seeing the imposter behind this semi-literate, child-like woman
with the cool sunglasses.
Morvern Callar is ultimately about the
grieving process, though some viewers are understandably frustrated by a
central character who gives off so little emotion and invites so little
sympathy. Why should we care? Well, maybe because Morvern is right to feel
burned by the bloody mess her boyfriend has left behind. And maybe because
characters don't have to be sympathetic to be compelling. Perhaps the best
reason to care is Samantha Morton, whose magnetic performance is all
suggestion: She isn't given much dialogue, so we have to read in her face the
slow thawing as she finally comes to terms with her boyfriend's death. Morvern
may be repellent, but Morton is an inviting presence, and she leads the
audience through the psychological haze.
So does the carefully chosen soundtrack. Make no
mistake: The mix-tape is a genuine love letter from the deceased to Morvern,
and the music mirrors her emotional progression. And Ramsay provides some
gorgeous imagery to match, as in this dreamy sequence where Morvern floats into
a supermarket to the tune of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood's "Some Velvet
Morning":
As Morvern strolls around with her Walkman, Ramsay
occasionally (and ingeniously) manipulates the soundtrack so we hear the bleed
from her earbud headphones. Ultimately, Ramsay suggests, this is her private
world, and we only have access to its echoes.
Coming up:
Next week: Irma Vep
March 13: Miami Blues
March 20: Babe: Pig In The City
March 27: They Live