Scottish director Lynne Ramsay followed up her debut Ratcatcher with Morvern Callar, an adaptation of Alan Warner's novel of the same name that Ramsay co-wrote with Liana Dognini. It proved that Ratcatcher was no one-off, cementing Ramsay's reputation as a visionary director of strikingly beautiful but quite odd films.
Morvern Callar follows the eponymous character, whose response to her boyfriend's suicide if to dismember him, bury his remains, claim authorship of his book, and go on holiday to Spain with her best friend Lanna. There, they take drugs, have sex with random men, and generally embrace hedonism. Callar remains an enigma: there's no suggestion that her relationship was abusive, and her calculating response to her boyfriend's death isn't explained. Arguably she's a psychopath, but nothing is explicit; dropped from the novel are her pregnancy and any insight into her thoughts or feelings. All the possibly baffled audience is left with is actions to observe and from them draw one's own conclusions.
Ramsay almost certainly wouldn't have it any other way. As demonstrated by Ratcatcher (and her subsequent films), she has a minimalist attitude of dialogue, much preferring to show rather than tell. It is several minutes into the film before we hear anyone speak, during which time we learn of Morvern's boyfriend's death and see the note he left for her. Lengthy sequences are dialogue free, or at least free of any meaningful dialogue. And so we watch as Callar careful cleans up blood and sets about hacking up a corpse, all whilst listening to music, and then cheerfully burying the parts in heather-strewn countryside. The only barometer of what she is thinking is the expression on Samantha Morton's face.
Morton's casting as Callar is a masterstroke, as she thrives in a film that requires her to do a vast amount of work with very few lines. In as much as the audience is privy to Callar's thoughts, it is because Morton occasionally lets us see them, or at least think that we do. She makes the character likeable, even when she's committing chopping up a corpse or cheerfully committing fraud. The only other cast member of real note is Kathleen McDermott as Lanna, Callar's friend who is dragged along in her wake and abandoned when she shows dissent with Callar's single-minded drive for conscience-free happiness. None of the other cast members put a foot wrong - it's inconceivable that Ramsay would allow them too - but they are bit-part players, supporting characters on Morvern's life far more literally than is usually the case for the protagonist in a film.
The other star of course is Ramsay herself, who is capable of making visually stunning films about deeply morbid people and places. The film is mostly shot in Scotland and Spain, with Ramsay fully exploiting the aesthetics of whatever environment she happens to be working in, so that a modern hotel full of British tourists can look as interesting (if not quite as picturesque) as a Scottish hillside. Alwin H. Küchler, who worked with Ramsay on Ratcatcher, returns as cinematographer and makes use of lots of grainy film stock, handheld camerawork and blurry close-ups, giving a disorienting feel to the first part of the film which reflects Morvern's whirling emotions after her boyfriend's suicide. The soundtrack is entirely diagetic, adding to the air of realism that Küchler's camerawork brings to an inherently unreal, often dreamlike story.
Morvern Callar achieves the unlikely feat of making its central character inherently unknowable and yet interesting and charismatic enough that the audience may discover at the end of the film that they want to know what happens to her next. That's usually a sign of compelling storytelling, but in this case it's almost an entirely a result of Samantha Morton's performance in front of the camera and Lynne Ramsay's talent behind it.
Morvern Callar follows the eponymous character, whose response to her boyfriend's suicide if to dismember him, bury his remains, claim authorship of his book, and go on holiday to Spain with her best friend Lanna. There, they take drugs, have sex with random men, and generally embrace hedonism. Callar remains an enigma: there's no suggestion that her relationship was abusive, and her calculating response to her boyfriend's death isn't explained. Arguably she's a psychopath, but nothing is explicit; dropped from the novel are her pregnancy and any insight into her thoughts or feelings. All the possibly baffled audience is left with is actions to observe and from them draw one's own conclusions.
Ramsay almost certainly wouldn't have it any other way. As demonstrated by Ratcatcher (and her subsequent films), she has a minimalist attitude of dialogue, much preferring to show rather than tell. It is several minutes into the film before we hear anyone speak, during which time we learn of Morvern's boyfriend's death and see the note he left for her. Lengthy sequences are dialogue free, or at least free of any meaningful dialogue. And so we watch as Callar careful cleans up blood and sets about hacking up a corpse, all whilst listening to music, and then cheerfully burying the parts in heather-strewn countryside. The only barometer of what she is thinking is the expression on Samantha Morton's face.
Morton's casting as Callar is a masterstroke, as she thrives in a film that requires her to do a vast amount of work with very few lines. In as much as the audience is privy to Callar's thoughts, it is because Morton occasionally lets us see them, or at least think that we do. She makes the character likeable, even when she's committing chopping up a corpse or cheerfully committing fraud. The only other cast member of real note is Kathleen McDermott as Lanna, Callar's friend who is dragged along in her wake and abandoned when she shows dissent with Callar's single-minded drive for conscience-free happiness. None of the other cast members put a foot wrong - it's inconceivable that Ramsay would allow them too - but they are bit-part players, supporting characters on Morvern's life far more literally than is usually the case for the protagonist in a film.
The other star of course is Ramsay herself, who is capable of making visually stunning films about deeply morbid people and places. The film is mostly shot in Scotland and Spain, with Ramsay fully exploiting the aesthetics of whatever environment she happens to be working in, so that a modern hotel full of British tourists can look as interesting (if not quite as picturesque) as a Scottish hillside. Alwin H. Küchler, who worked with Ramsay on Ratcatcher, returns as cinematographer and makes use of lots of grainy film stock, handheld camerawork and blurry close-ups, giving a disorienting feel to the first part of the film which reflects Morvern's whirling emotions after her boyfriend's suicide. The soundtrack is entirely diagetic, adding to the air of realism that Küchler's camerawork brings to an inherently unreal, often dreamlike story.
Morvern Callar achieves the unlikely feat of making its central character inherently unknowable and yet interesting and charismatic enough that the audience may discover at the end of the film that they want to know what happens to her next. That's usually a sign of compelling storytelling, but in this case it's almost an entirely a result of Samantha Morton's performance in front of the camera and Lynne Ramsay's talent behind it.