Ramsay uses the distinct qualities of cinema, images and sound, to immerse you in the psychic space of her characters – and what an uncommonly beautiful space it is. It’s one of the ironies or tragedies of her protagonists that the very trauma they’ve experienced renders their world hyper-sensory, bursts of color and noise assaulting them from all sides. There’s no better way to experience these films than in a dark room with maximum sound exposure and images projected on the largest possible screen.
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To start with, her name. It has the ring of a rare side effect, what happens when you mix party drugs, and it reads like an anagram – but an anagram for what? She is an enigma, but only if you try to get to know her, because the facts, they’re just words, and no one’s really listening. Former foster kid, Scottish Highlands, dead-end job at a grocery store. Her man went and slit his wrists in the kitchen after Christmas. But who said that she wanted a boyfriend, anyway? Everybody gets her name wrong – Mervo, Marvall. Let them mispronounce her, let them try to flirt. In the meantime she’ll be Jackie, she’ll be Olga, she’ll be the author of someone else’s life, and she’ll sell it for six figures while on holiday in Spain. Moral, amoral: this is a dialogue low on the sound mix. What does it mean to be a plagiarist in a world drunk on images? What does it mean to be unreadable when no one bothers to read the book?
Morvern Callar is one of the jewels of twenty-first-century British cinema, which is to say, it’s a shining example of an artform currently in the throes of its extinction. The film, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, was financed in part by the UK Film Council, a non-departmental public body that no longer exists. One of its main distributors, Alliance Atlantis, was swallowed up in 2007 by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, which promptly disposed of the corpse. The film grain of Morvern Callar has itself become a rare commodity. These days, a 400-ft roll of 35mm negative from Kodak will run you $316.59 – get it now before Eastman Kodak shuts down what remains of their celluloid operations. There’s something quaint about the fact that Morvern was released in 2002, the same year that the five major Hollywood studios founded Digital Cinema Initiatives, an organization that, more than any, has accelerated the demise of theatrical presentation. Small wonder, then, that Lynne Ramsay, the director of Morvern Callar, has managed to get only two films made in the intervening twenty years. “Why am I not making more?” she asked herself, in a 2019 interview. “I suppose it’s all a money thing.”
Which is a shame, because I can’t think of a director who would be better served by the kind of slow-burn theatrical release that doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t go to Lynne Ramsay for what you can get on TV. Her films are moody and oblique and notably light on narrative; they reward re-viewing, and take up permanent residence in the mind. Each of them deals with the aftermath of violence on its traumatized survivors, whether they’re a shell-shocked veteran (You Were Never Really Here), or the mother of a school shooter (We Need to Talk about Kevin), an accidental murderer (Ratcatcher), or the surviving girlfriend of a suicide (Morvern Callar). She uses the distinct qualities of cinema, images and sound, to immerse you in the psychic space of her characters – and what an uncommonly beautiful space it is. It’s one of the ironies or tragedies of her protagonists that the very trauma they’ve experienced renders their world hyper-sensory, bursts of color and noise assaulting them from all sides. There’s no better way to experience these films than in a dark room with maximum sound exposure and images projected on the largest possible screen.
Morvern Callar is the most abstract of her films and represents arguably the most successful use of her directorial method. The story can be described in a sentence: the girlfriend of a writer takes authorship of his completed manuscript after he kills himself, sells the book under her own name, and flees to Spain with her friend. The drama is propelled almost entirely by the mystery of its lead character, about whom we are given almost no backstory, and whose actions are never explained. There is very little dialogue in the film, and none of it is essential. The film is an adaptation of Alan Warner’s 1995 novel; crucially, Ramsay and her co-writer chose to dispense with that novel’s interior monologue: there is no voice-over to help us interpret the events of the story. What unfolds is a series of headlong dives into the perspective of an anomaly, someone we can’t fully comprehend and who probably on some level is incomprehensible to herself. “What’s wrong with you? What do you want?” her friend Lanna says at one point near the end of the movie, fed up with Morvern’s cryptic nature. “What planet are you from?”
There is something philosophical in the film’s complete indifference to providing answers, in its rejection of normative psychology and exposition. In place of words, we see faces, hands, unusually muscular limbs. Sound design is crucial here, as it is in all Ramsay’s films. There is no orchestral soundtrack; there is only diegetic sound, and a whole lot of it: chatter, traffic, industrial noise, seagulls. Morvern’s boyfriend gifted her a mixtape for Christmas before killing himself, and throughout the movie, she is never without her headphones: when she listens to a song, we listen to it too, cuts of Warp Records and ’60s psychedelia thrumming across the screen. Morvern is a raver and spends most of the movie chasing her next drink and tab, and whether this represents a form of grieving, a habit of dissociation, or a lifetime in evasion, that’s an open question. Ramsay has zero interest in diagnosing or even classifying Morvern. She’s content to trail her into rowdy parties and strobing dancefloors, her camera handheld and woozy, a gleeful participant without ever losing control. She has a knack for the precise edit, for the variation of mood and tempo. Like one of her heroes, Stanley Kubrick, she cut her teeth as a photographer, and her flair for composition shows; for every one of her handheld dives, we are met with a stationary image, its angles and lighting subtly skewed, estranging the viewer from a more direct identification with the events being depicted on-screen.
All of this serves character. And while Ramsay has style to burn, the success of Morvern Callar is also a tribute to its lead performer, Samantha Morton, who embodies the near-silent protagonist with astonishing expressiveness. There is a haunted quality to her performance that cannot be faked. She marries the intense watchfulness of a hunted animal with the physical ease of a born predator. See how she pounces on the cute boy down the hall in a Spanish hotel. Sidles up to the door, knocks twice, hesitates, then tosses her wet hair, and claims her place with two sharp raps. As soon as she lays eyes on him, he’s got nowhere to run. There’s a look of almost slack-jawed desire on her face, hungry, aching, which quickly masks itself beneath an unnatural solicitousness. “You alright?” she says, her voice soft and reedy, like an instrument she hasn’t played in years. “My mum’s dead,” he says, before turning into the room, leaving her to follow him over the threshold into what she knows she wants. One line of dialogue – the rest is movement, expression, superhuman presence. Morton, in conspiracy with Ramsay, posits in Morvern Callar a femininity founded on impunity, with almost no mediation between desire and will. In other words, Morvern Callar is a gangster movie. It’s about a British lady who goes where she wants to go, fucks who she wants to fuck, makes money she hasn’t earned, and offers no apologies whatsoever. “The ants are nice,” she says, when someone asks her what she likes about Spain.
Is it a surprise that Morvern Callar fared poorly at the box office? Might there be other compensations? “Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones,” wrote Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. Morvern Callar, as a cult object, becomes more miraculous with every passing year of film culture’s decimation. Released the same weekend in America as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the film sits teetering on Mount Doom, and looks into the void to come. “Like Proust, [Benjamin] was wholly incapable of ‘changing his life conditions even when they were about to crush him.’” It would take Ramsay nine years to get another film off the ground. Although Morton received an Oscar nomination the next year for In America, she has never found a part – or a director – as excellent as this. She too has paid the price of speaking truth to power in Hollywood. “I was told I was difficult if I didn’t want to take my bra off,” she said in a recent interview. “I was told I was difficult if I was late to set. And I was sometimes late to set because I had my period and I was trying to hide the tampon string, so I was treated horrifically at that time by male directors, male producers, and it was awful.” Weinstein may be behind bars, but the real prisoners aren’t running the asylum. The genius women of cinema, what are they supposed to do? How can the small screen of TV, the content mill, be anything but a reduction? Nan Goldin and Falconetti had a baby and that baby is Morvern Callar; a certain bigness, volume, is called for with talents as large as Ramsay and Morton’s. In the absence of a savior, here, then, is a late miracle: a female-directed, female-starring film, funded by the British lottery, about an unrepentant woman with no redeeming qualities, who pays no consequences, and learns nothing at the end. The existence of such a film is far-fetched, beguiling, unexplained, and unexplainable.
Morvern Callar is one of a kind, then. Morvern Callar is Morvern Callar.
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All images are screenshots from the film, courtesy of DVD Beaver.
