DAILY FILM DOSE: A Daily Film Appreciation and Review Blog: MORVERN CALLAR

Saturday 17 March 2007

MORVERN CALLAR


Morvern Callar (2002) dir. Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott

***1/2

Guest Review by Blair Stewart

This is the story of a too-quiet check-out girl who comes home to find her rich boyfriend dead by his own hand. He's left her a manuscript on the computer to be sent to publishers, money for the funeral, a jaw-dropping mixtape to listen to and instructions for poor working-class Morvern Callar to follow to insure his martyred legacy for art. But Morvern chooses otherwise.

Taking us from the suffocating grey blur of Scotland to the open blue comedown mornings of Spain, Lynne Ramsay's sophomore triumph observes a ghostly Samantha Morton who could be in the midst of a great internal crisis amongst all night raves and random sex, but we can't really tell and she might never will, she just might keep inscrutably drifting outwards.

Using a lively camera as a microscope on the spiritual unease of our times and an aforementioned soundtrack packing the likes of Aphex Twin, Can, Ween and Stereolab as a possible window into the protagonist's state, Ramsay film doesn't have a tidy opening or ending, it drops us into the middle of an unpredictable situation. Like Morton's performance, it is rare and raw and very much alive.

If I live to see the other side of this century (and I hope I do), should I be asked to name one world event, one album and one film to sum up what it was like to live during this post-everything generation, the answer likely will come as simply then as it does right now: 9/11, Kid A by Radiohead, Morvern Callar.
Enjoy.

Buy it here: Morvern Callar


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