die my love (w&d lynne ramsay, w. alice birch, enda walsh)

It turns out that Scorsese, who sent Ariana Harwicz’s novel to Jennifer Lawrence, and I have similar taste. The complexity of translating first person prose to all-seeing-eye cinema was always going to be challenging, and the film has a hit-and-miss approach, with moments of visceral Ramsay-esque filmmaking and other moments where the story just seems to rumble along. Lawrence loves being a fucked-up mother, something she has a real flair for, but in some ways the star turn is Sissy Spacek’s. She retains a luminosity which seems made for the screen, a counterpoint to the film’s emotional extravagance. 

morvern callar (w&d lynn ramsay, w. liana dognini)

Someone once sent me a copy of this film and it has been sitting on my hard drive or my cloud, or a disk drive, or some kind of infinite space construction for many years. I am glad I never watched it on my laptop and the first time I encountered it was in the cinema. Even if there was a classic Cinemateca moment when the sound vanished for five minutes. Because, like all Ramsay’s work, Morvern Callar is an immersive, profoundly cinematic experience. Ramsey feels to me like a chef who takes what seems like far too few ingredients and cooks up something completely original and unexpected. As so often, the plot is thin, a tremulous coming of age story, stitched around an unlikely twist. But it is fleshed out with beautiful and brilliant set pieces. A party or a rave or a Spanish village fiesta. The film also makes the most of two lovely performances by Samantha Morton and the lesser heralded Kathleen McDermott, as Morvern & Lanna, two friends who have adventures together. There was a moment when a kid with a Peckham T-shirt made me laugh out loud - has any film better captured that absurd combination of humour and idiocy that has defined British youth culture since the eighties, where self-knowledge goes hand in hand with self-oblivion and the greatest virtue in life is to get properly mashed? Spain became a kind of spiritual home for this way of thinking, that other world where the sun always shines and the party never stops. Somehow the film captures all this with charm and empathy. Ramsay deep dives into a British Scotland a British Spain and a Spanish Spain, and it’s always a trip. 

you were never really here (w&d lynne ramsay)

Ramsay’s film is one of those frustrating films which are better than most others, but still not nearly as good as you feel it might have been. Joaquin Phoenix, verging on the portly, is military vet who makes a living out of carrying out hits with nothing more than a hammer. He’s haunted by a multi-layered traumatic past, revealed in gossamer-thin flashbacks. There’s the recurrent image of a body/ head twisted in fabric, a link to Ratcatcher. There’s an intensity of image which is both beautiful and potent. The fact that Phoenix barely speaks is immaterial: we still know how his mind works. Using a fertile cinematic grammar, Ramsey explores his psyche through an exploration of the image. 

However, You Were Never Really There is, essentially, a B-Movie. There’s very little in the way of narrative development and the storyline of the Phoenix character deciding he has to rescue a young girl feels like an excuse for a narrative. There’s none of the play of Alice in the Cities, a movie which is perhaps comparable in terms of an older man constructing an unlikely bond with a girl. In effect this is a film with an incredibly detailed surface, without suggesting there’s all that much beneath it. Perhaps it should be approached os an exercise in aesthetics, but the violence (implicit rather than explicit)  carries its own baggage: it is justified? Is a narrative constructed around a violent killer viable entertainment fodder? Lynn Ramsay does Tarantino seems a bit unlikely, but this might have been the film’s real hook. Instead it feels as though the filmmaker shies away from the more complex implications of her chosen story.