Customer Reviews

Morvern Callar [VHS]

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

This is not the best film ever, and it certainly is going to bore some people. However, it's a remarkable piece of work outside Hollywood's beaten paths. The point is to *show* us a woman, to leave us with a many-colored, personal view of her, simply by close, intelligent observation through the camera. The film does not sacrifice to plot, and it especially does not sacrifice to text. It uses the classical means of film, but scoured of the accommodations films make for those two elements TV has trained us to see as central - story and speech.

There is little story - Morvern wakes up on Dec. 24 to find her live-in boyfriend (Tom?) dead by suicide, mourns him privately, then goes out for Christmas eve and explains to her best friend, Lana, that Tom has left for some other country. She later avoids the troubles of dealing with authorities by cutting up the body and burying the parts in the heath outside Glasgow. She then sends Tom's manuscript novel to a publisher, as instructed, but under her own name. The manuscript is accepted, and she takes the money Tom had left for his funeral to go with Lana on a late-winter vacation in Spain. By keeping her mouth shut at the right moments, she manages to get a hundred-thousand-pound advance for the novel. She finds the check in the mail when she comes back home. She immediately sets out on another trip outside the UK (we don't know where), with no intention of coming back. Lana refuses to come, so we leave Morvern alone waiting for the train out of Glasgow. Of course she knows that all the publisher will get for its money is the manuscript it already has. There will me no rewrites, no proof corrections, no interviews and no next novel. Better be out of reach.

There is even less talk (that can be understood) - When not at work Morvern lives by emotions, and finds them in party environments. Most speech is drowned by the noise, and what comes through is the kind of short phrases you'd exchange in passing during such a party - except that a lot of it will be lost on you if you're not Glaswegian. The film aims a joke at viewers that illuminates the theme. Lana says "pal" is a synonym for "neighbor". Much later, in Spain, she sets out to reveal to Morvern that she slept with Tom while he lived with Morvern: "We were pals." While she's trying to clarify, Morvern tries to cut her off: "Tom is dead." Of course, Lana understands: "That's all water under the bridge". File under Important Communications with Best Friend.

What you're left with (as exemplified by other reports here) is a feeling for who Morvern is. I was especially struck by her capacity to find her footing and her simple, unemotional, determination when she has a goal in mind. The word that came to mind was "survivor", but *not* in the sense of "survivor to the suicide of her boyfriend". How did I come to feel this? By watching Morvern, and that's the whole point of Ramsay's method. You get a lot for your 97 minutes of viewing, but it's not plot and it's not talk. It's a person.

Many people might not understand Lynn Ramsay's beautiful cinematic adaptation of Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar because they have not read the novel. Of course many people who read the novel misunderstood Morvern, as well. In a cold port town in Scotland, Morvern is faced with a life that is void of hope and comfort. Instead of bitching about it, she turns inward to music and films. When her boyfriend committs suicide on Christmas Eve, Morvern finds herself faced with letting the outside world know of her pain or hiding it from them. Disposing of his body is her way of keeping the secret, possibly even repressing her own pain. She further escapes to warmer climes, raves, and the closeness of another hurting human body. Just as in Scotland, Morvern finds herself only able to relate to the land and the music of Spain. Although she is physically close with the sweaty bodies during the rave scenes, she is metaphorically distant and unable to relate. The soundtrack captures this brilliantly with the juxtaposition of "while I'm far away from you my baby" over the psychodelic rave scene.

After Ratcatcher, I could think of no better person to adapt this groundbreaking novel than Lynne Ramsay.

It's simply brilliant.

This is an "unusual" film, and is not for folks who need to "understand" everything, or have an explanation to everything that occurs in a film.

From the very beginning, you know this is not your typical Hollywood type film. The film opens with closeup shot of a woman (Morvern) lying in a dark room, with her face illuminated by the rhythmic flash of a reddish light nearby. At first one assumes she's in bed, and that she is in some seedy hotel, or else in a sketchy neighborhood full of bars, etc. But as the camera pulls back, we see that she's actually lying on her apartment floor, caressing the body of her apparently dead boyfriend, as the Christmas tree lights flash in the background.

Over the next few days, we see how she deals (and in some ways doesn't deal) with his death. Her boyfriend had put a new screensaver on his PC that says "READ ME". It directs her to his suicide note, where he doesn't offer any insight as to why he killed himself, but says that he loves her, and oh yeah, that the novel he was working on can be found on the disk in the drawer, and that the novel is "for her".

We don't see many other pivotal characters in the film, except for Morvern's close friend from her supermarket job. Morvern never tells her friend about her boyfriend's suicide, and instead simply tells her that he "left her".

Morvern submits her boyfriend's novel to a publishing company in London, and waits to hear back from them. In the meantime, Morvern goes about her day-to-day life, which basically consists of a menial job at a depressing supermarket in some small coastal town in Scotland, and partying during the evening.

The party scenes are really well done. You can't just throw together a bunch of colored lights, loud music and some actors drinking alcohol, and think you're going to provide a real sense of the partying experience across to the audience. But this director did an excellent job, as well as the writer, by using lots of clipped language/bits of conversations, which is exactly how you hear things at a party, especially once you're a bit drunk. And the camera work and the lighting are also done to perfection in these scenes.

Morvern invites her friend to go with her to Spain (somewhere on the southern coast I guess), for vacation. This trip also provides us with some great scenes, as the girls get lost one night on the open road in the middle of two towns, and another time they happen upon a small town in the midst of a local religious street festival.

Again, there is lots of endless partying, and some freewheeling sexcapades during their trip to Spain. Both girls don't seem to have much else going on in their lives.

While in Spain, Morvern learns that the publisher is interested in "her" book, and that they'd like to fly to Spain to see her. Once Morvern meets with them, she learns that they are prepared to give her 100,000 pounds for the rights to the story. Naturally Morvern is quite thrilled with this.

She returns home a few weeks later, and lo and behold, there is her check in the mail. But she doesn't seem to have any lofty plans for the money, other than to go back to Spain and have some more "fun". The film ends in Spain, with an image of a lonely, directionless Morvern. It's actually quite cool how the director did it, and the song playing in the background is so perfect for the particular scene.

While this movie certainly isn't uplifting, I appreciate the artistic aspects of it.

Winner of awards for Best Actress (for both Samantha Morton and Kathleen McDermott in different competitions), Best Direction (Lynne Ramsay), and Best Cinematography (Alwin Kuchler) at film festivals from Cannes to Bratislava, Morvern Callar is a strange, haunting picture of alienated youth with few goals and even fewer opportunities. From the outset Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) is passive and emotionally frozen. Waking up Christmas morning, she discovers her boyfriend dead beside her, a suicide, but she ignores the body, puts on her makeup and goes out to a party, where she drinks, dances, goes to bed with two people, participates in nude snowball-throwing, and tells her friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) that her boyfriend has "gone to another country."

He has left behind Christmas presents, recorded music, a message of love, and a just-completed novel, asking her to send it to a publisher. Changing his name to her own on the manuscript, she sends it off. She then disposes of the body, cleans the apartment, and invites her girlfriend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) over to spend the night. Her boyfriend's "funeral money" buys tickets to Spain for a vacation with Lanna, a fellow employee in the meat room of a local supermarket. The surprising, immediate sale of his manuscript gives her additional money to travel wherever she wants in Spain, seeking action at the beach, parties with other young people, and sensual pleasure.

With some scenes filmed with a handheld camera, the film has the tone of a home movie, giving it remarkable verisimilitude. The action and the characters feel real--human--and the mumbling voices and sometimes incomprehensible accents keep the film low-key and even more realistic. The cinematography (Alwin Kuchler) is brilliant, with dramatic scenes showing stark light and dark contrasts--backlit empty halls, bleak snowfalls, staircases appearing to go nowhere, flashing lights freeze-framing action, and vast, empty expanses contrasting with frantic activity--the cinematography emphasizing the emptiness of the characters' lives and their bleak prospects. The loud, sometimes jazzy score further emphasizes their alienation.

Morton makes a compelling, emotionally dissociated Movern Callar, conveying her reckless search for excitement and her slowly developing need for peace. McDermott as Lanna is even more frenetic and uninhibited, and there is never a sense that either of these actresses is acting. The director's touch is light, giving the actors leeway to explore their roles, which they do boldly but with a touching poignancy. R-rated for good reason, the film succeeds in capturing a seldom-featured segment of youthful society, presenting the constant search for pleasure as a way to escape the pain. Mary Whipple

The pretentious film goer has never had a greater ally than Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar.

What is little more than a bland stew of typically successful indy film techniques (hand-held shot, character-based, amoral, unique, hip, naked) becomes an immenitely defensible, but truly awful film.

To merely skim the surface:

Why Morvern is touted as a study of progress, liberation, or self-discovery is dificult to see when both the plot and character remain static throughout the film; indeed the initial party scene and lingering final shot seem to echo each other in a way which makes the beautiful cinemotography seem little more than a thoroughly convincing blue screen selected to flash in time with a cautiously hip soundtrack.

Although other indy film goers may crucify the non-believers, this sort of movie is equally disgusting as the bloated star-powered behemoth that has equally little depth of thought or genuine vision. That sort, however, is only after our money. Morvern Caller is after something much more dangerous: our admiration.

For more information on Lynne Ramsay's film, see: "No Skin Off My Nose," a succesful, art-house play prominately featured in The Fountainhead.

"Morvern Callar," a film directed by Lynn Ramsey, is another very dark, very Scottish film made with the assistance of the Glasgow Film Board. It's a multiple prize winner:nominated for 14 awards, it took nine. It's based on a novel by Alan Warner, and might be considered another entry in the tartan noir school of filmmaking: just a bit bloodthirsty; more than a little graphic in its portrayal of young people going about their daily rounds of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The highly talented Samantha Morton stars as Morvern Callar, a young woman without a future, working as a grocery store clerk in Oban, a picturesque town, full of retirees, on Scotland's west coast. It's a town where futures are not made. She awakes one morning to find her boyfriend has committed suicide. Her behavior then is not what we'd expect; it goes well beyond ordinary denial as we'd conceive it. She spends the funeral money he'd left her to get herself and her best friend from the store to a vacation in Spain; lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll to be found there. She also signs her name to the novel the boyfriend had written, and sets about trying to sell it as he'd instructed on his last disk.

Director Ramsey, in this movie, follows the maxim "Show, Don't Tell." It's intense, frequently color-saturated, particularly in the Spanish scenes, and moves fast. No spoon feeding of what to think, no backstory, no voiceovers, just a close up,unblinking eye on Morvern and company. Her first film, "Ratcatcher," also set in Glasgow, was almost unwatchable in some unbearably dark scenes;evidently she doesn't believe in going easy on her audience.

I don't get the negative reviews for "Morvern Callar." I can understand why many won't like this film--but I can't understand why they watched it. You can tell what kind of film it is right off the bat. Don't their DVD players have OFF switches?

Here's who should watch it:
(1) people who appreciate great acting--Samantha Morton is amazing;
(2) people who realize that the choices available to middle class, college educated Americans are not the choices available to lower working class Scots living in a stratified society where your accent is your destiny. Think "My Fair Lady" except Eliza Doolittle never met Professor 'iggins and had to make her way on her own, only set in the 1990s, only the UK hasn't changed that much in this regard;
(3) people who don't require Hollywood production values, special effects sequences, and artificially flavored happy endings;
(4) people who are prepared to admire Morvern for using everything at her disposal to cope with the rotten hand life dealt her.

I'd be honored to know someone like Morvern, inarticulate working-class bloke that she is. Her educated artistic boyfriend saw something in her that isn't obvious at the beginning--except that she's reasonably attractive. What's inside her is slowly revealed through the course of the movie, which will only seem aimless to those who want to be lead by the hand, like Hollywood is only too happy to do.

My spouse thoroughly disapproved of this movie and Morvern's life choices, and I haven't been able to change her mind. So I understand how appalled some will be at this movie, even some who have been exposed to hundreds of interesting films from all over the world. But though Morvern's no saint and doesn't pretend to be, I approve of her actions in the context in which they occur.

My own father only had a 7th grade education, so perhaps I'm in a better position to understand the working poor. There's so much we take for granted.

For me the high point of the film is a scene in which she's negotiating with two publisher's representatives. She's waaay over her head and bloody well knows it, but she's also plucky and resourceful, and watching her navigate these waters, continually at the brink of disaster, is both wonderful to watch and a wonder of magnificent, mostly wordless acting on Samantha Morton's part. This is a scene I'd show to acting classes.

I'd also use this if I were trying to teach people what "middle class" and "lower class" mean existentially.

Lastly, I know of no other film like this. It doesn't remind me of anything else except perhaps Kurosawa's version of "The lower depths." But that's a stretch.

See "Morvern Callar" if you're honestly prepared to visit the life of someone who absolutely is not from your world.

Supermarket clerk Morvern Callar's boyfriend commits suicide, leaving behind several different kinds of gifts. Literally, these include Christmas presents set beneath a tree that pulsates with red and green lights, the alternation of buzz/quiet introducing the reader to the strange dictotomy of noise and silence in this film. The boyfriend also specifically bequeaths Morvern a tape from his music collection that he has orchestrated for her and which forms the lyric background to this haunting film. But in a suicide note that Morvern finds on his computer, he also tells her that he loves her, whatever that means in the context of this grim world, and that a novel on the computer was written "for her." She "takes" this message and her lover's gifts in more than one sense.

The remainder of the film explores the effects of these various gifts. After first abandoning the body for days, partying in a kind of frenzy of denial, she then gathers herself, disposes of it, and forms a plan, which seems more improvisation than calculation. Morvern remains oddly kind and innocent, even as she dismembers the boyfriend and buries him on a bluff. She then sends off the boyfriend's novel to a publisher under her own name and uses his money to escape to Spain where she goes clubbing with her best friend Lanna, trying to blot out pain and create meaning in her life the only way she knows how. Her incorporation of her boyfriend's life signals her incorporation as well of his pain. Her actions seem less a desertion or desecration of his suicide than an embodiment of it.

Brilliantly natural acting, daring cinematography, and a precise director's eye (the award-winning Lynne Ramsay) make this an interesting but disturbing film. European youth culture, in particular, comes off as nihilistic and self-destructive.

Didn't anyone realize there is more to meet the eye than the superficial and assumed events that occur during the film? I fail to see how anyone could be attracted to this movie without being able to analyze it for its more expressive content.

Morvern is awakened and released from her monotony by an otherwise crippling event. It could be said that she is immoral, or, that she is thrusted into an opportunity. She chooses a life outside of her mundane existence. She only takes Lana with her because she assumes her friendship will continue to be meaningful. Morvern doesn't really want to party. She simply doesn't know how to adjust. Her "sexcapade" was actually her revisiting her late boyfriend. This event evidently serves as some closure for her, whether or not it was an actual physical occurrence. As her trip progresses, she is rewarded for her adventurous free-thinking, and later is stripped of her extraneous attachments. The movie finishes without a conveniently tied-up end. Whereas this might annoy some, others might realize there really aren't any answers. And trying to find one in a movie about a girl who discovers her dead lover won't get you anywhere but thinking of your own.

In addition, it is important to note how the soundtrack serves as an integral part of the movie. It is at times stark, and both emotionally and vacantly touches the void left in the boyfriend's wake.

This is pretentious nonsense at its worst -- cinema for the stoned or for those with incredibly short attention spans. The director does not appear to be able to commit to any particular scene or mood. There are scores of scenes where Ms. Morton appears to have been directed to just "do anything while I pan the camera over you." The one potentially interesting development of the plot, Morvern's sale of her dead boyfriend's novel manuscript, ends up leading nowhere. There are brilliant, unconventional films where the visual fabric dominates the conventional storylines, and then there are films like this that get by on being so jarring and pretentious that viewers are afraid to say it sucks.