Dir. Christine Molloy/Joe Lawlor, UK/Ireland, 2008, 79 mins
Cast: Annie Townsend, Sandie Malia, Dennis Jobling
Review By Carol Allen
From a summary of the plot – a young girl goes missing, another girl is asked to play her in a police reconstruction – you might think this was the stuff of a conventional murder mystery. It is in fact an idiosyncratically made study of alienation.
The film arises out of a community project Molloy and Lawlor have been working on for five years, making short films using unedited long takes, local non-professional actors and minimal story. Although they've made some concessions for their first feature film – they do have a story and they do make some use of cutaways – they are still using the same basic technique.
The story idea is a good one. Helen (Townsend), an 18-year-old, has been brought up in a care home. The care order is now about to end, launching her into the outside world. She is an isolated girl with little sense of her own identity or knowledge of her past, in contrast to Joy, the missing girl, who has a loving family, a boyfriend, plenty of friends and every expectation of a fulfilling life. When Helen is asked to play Joy in the reconstruction, she insinuates herself in a rather creepy way into the missing girl's life, attempting to form relationships with Joy's boyfriend Danny (Danny Groenland) and her parents (Malia and Jobling), even wearing the identical clothes to Joy's that she's been given for the reconstruction.
In avoiding conventional filmmaking mode however, the style of the film itself is alienating. Helen herself is virtually impassive, her emotions locked in and the only clue we are given to her feelings is the voiceover in her head of her one-way conversations with the missing girl. When there is an emotional scene, as when the parents are told that Joy's personal possessions have been found in the woods where she was last seen, the directors avoid any intimacy in the shooting. They are overall very sparing with close ups, avoiding normal film language and keeping us emotionally distanced by choosing for example to shoot a conversation in one continuous wide shot as opposed to cutting from one person to another. There is little story development, the pace is irritatingly even and while it is valid that the focus should be on Helen rather than finding out what has happened to the missing girl, even here we are left hanging in the air. Now that she is about to leave the care home, Helen is going to be allowed to see her personal files, which will tell her about her background before being taken into care. Why, one wonders, was she not given this information as she was growing up? But that dramatic strand too is left undeveloped.
The film to be fair is handsomely shot by Ole Birkeland and Malia and Jobling in particular give moving performances within the limits of the film. It's a worthy but ultimately frustrating experiment in filmmaking and the only strong feeling one is left with is that, if Helen is a typical example of the effects of being in care, then the system itself must be seriously inadequate.
|
