The Velvet Café

A young woman’s boyfriend dies. She’s left with enough money to buy herself and a friend a charter week on Ibiza. But she also gets something more: the manuscript of a novel that he’s been working on and a request that she should send it to a publisher. And so she does, but only after she has switched his name on the title page for her own.

Doesn’t this sound like a highly usable story for a movie? I mean, you can tell it in so many different ways.

It could be a crime thriller: what’s the truth about the death of her boyfriend. Is it really as we’re set up to believe at the start? And will she get away with the script theft or will someone get suspicious?

It could also be a feel-good movie: she meets people during her journey and step by step they make her realize that she’s done a bad thing. She’ll confess, make a walk of shame, fall in love with some guy who also has done a big mistake in his past. Finally she’ll write a book of her own based on her experiences and it will become a huge success.

It could be a tragedy, a morbid comedy, even a musical. Hedwig and the Angry Inch showed that musicals very well can deal with serious and dark topics.

Sticky cinematography
Lynne Ramsay went for something different with Morvern Callar. She made it into what I’d best describe as an impressionistic art film. I can’t recall any dialogue from the film, though I assume people must have spoken to each other once in a while. But this film isn’t about words; it’s all about images.

I’m not necessarily a fan of films picturing people walking around in the world with a miserable look in their eyes, doing random things or – in worst case – nothing at all. Sometimes it works for me, as in the case of . SomewhereSometimes it bores me out of my mind, as with The Comedy. And I’m not capable of telling what exactly makes it go one way or the other.

In the case of Morvern Callar there’s no question of what makes me embrace it, despite the fact that I’m not completely on board with the main character. It’s in the cinematography, which has that special Ramsay feel to it. As with the two other Ramsay films I’ve seen, the images stick in my mind, like a shadow of the sun remains on your eyelids when you’ve been looking directly at the sun even if your mum told you not to. In Ratcatcher it’s a boy running through a field under a blue sky.  In We Need to Talk about Kevin it’s a woman covered in tomato juice and laundry in a backyard moving with the wind. In Morvern Callar it’s blinking Christmas lights as seen from a floor perspective.

The storytelling
“Hey there!” says my inner critic. “What about the storytelling then? Don’t you always claim that you prefer movies that tell a story to movies that are like poems or art installations? Isn’t that exactly what this is?” My answer is: no. The storytelling is somewhat slow and a quite subtle, as you have to second guess what’s going on in the mind of Morvern from her facial expressions and from her – sometimes irrational – actions. But the fact remains: not once did I look down on my watch to check the time. I was too wrapped up in the mood and the music and the flow of images to remember that I had a wrist watch and that the film had an end.

The only conclusion I can draw is that this poem of a film worked for me.

Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, UK 2002) My rating: 4/5