Dir: Samantha Morton, UK , 2009, 106 mins
Cast: Robert Carlyle, Susan Lynch, Molly Windsor
Review by Dave Hall
Morton's debut as director was first screened on Channel 4 last year, but is now getting a well-deserved cinema release. It tells of an 11 year-old girl who, abused and abandoned by her parents, has to adjust to life in care. Thirty or forty years ago this is the sort of subject matter that would routinely have found its way onto Play for Today; in the noughties, The Unloved is something of an oddity, a full length, social realist drama that probably needed Morton's name attached to it to get made at all.
At the start of the film, Lucy ( Windsor ) is living with her father (Carlyle), who we see physically abusing her. She is taken into a care home, where she rooms with 16 year-old Lauren (Lauren Socha), and witnesses the older girl shoplifting, glue-sniffing and having sex with the home's manager (Craig Parkinson). Lucy also flashes back to the day of her communion, and regularly absconds from the home to visit places that have meaning for her, including the home of her estranged mother (Lynch).
As has been widely publicised, Morton's was brought up in care, so you'd expect the film to have a ready-made authenticity. But while she no doubt intended this at least partly as a political statement, her approach is just a little too wistful to hit home; a little like using a poem to call for a revolution. The mystical is further brought out in Tony Grisoni's screenplay (he wrote the fantasy drama Tideland , which also featured a neglected child), and Lucy's affinity with animals is reminiscent of Phillip Pullman's concept of the familiar in Northern Lights .
Though made for TV, The Unloved is stunningly cinematic, with shots of faces, landscapes and everyday objects confidently framed and held in intimate detail. Unsurprisingly, Morton's direction is just as sensitive as her acting, and Windsor is superb as Lucy; we see the world through her eyes, the dysfunction of her own family mirrored by that of the care home, her near wordlessness an indication of how powerless she feels (though sometimes she's so withdrawn we suspect she might be autistic).
If Carlyle, as a fragile hard nut is a slightly too obvious bit of casting, the other roles are filled convincingly largely by unknowns, and the cinematography and sound design are cleverly used to heighten Lucy's separateness. During Lucy's encounters with her social worker, for example, the sound is dropped completely or limited only to the dialogue; or as she travels along in a car, the homes she passes are reflected in the window, almost dreamlike in their intangibility.
This is a heartfelt and confidently realised piece of work that may be too subtle to have much of an impact politically or socially, but which gives you an expressionist glimpse of what the vulnerable can be exposed to in state care.
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