I Know It’s Hard For You, My Baby

I fear that I may have waited a little too long to write about Morvern Callar. Though a lot of memorable scenes and images are still fairly fresh in my mind, my initial flush of excitement about it has fallen off. Most of the things I would have wanted to say about the way the film looks and sounds have already been articulated far better than I probably would have written them by Todd here and here.

One of the things that I find very remarkable about Morvern Callar is the way the story’s tone subtly shifts about halfway through from being quiet, brooding, and morbid to becoming something of a dark comedy in the third act. Thinking about it right now, I can’t think of anything else I’ve seen or read that pulls that off without ever seeming disjointed. I’m also quite impressed by Lynne Ramsey’s visual storytelling skill in addition to her eye for composition and framing. Much of the first half hour is wordless, but is told with a flair for style and narrative economy that stood in stark contrast with the narrative mess of All The Real Girls, which I had seen earlier in the day. I’m sort of glad that I saw those two films in the same day, to see the difference between how an aspiring amateur and an inspired professional differ in telling a story on film.

Of course, one of the major draws of Morvern Callar is the superb soundtrack and the way it is integrated into the film. Since Todd has already discussed this, I’ll just note that it felt really…cool, for a lack of a better word, to hear a lot of songs which I already loved in the film. I was aware that the film had a number of Can/Holger Czukay songs on its soundtrack before I saw it, but I didn’t know which songs. When Can’s “I Want More” was played very briefly early in the film, I got a nice jolt of joy since that has always been one of my favorite Can songs, and I’ve always thought it was very underrated and neglected. It was also fantastic to hear one of my favorite Broadcast songs, “You Can Fall”, halfway through, even though I must admit that I didn’t immediately recognize it. The soundtrack album is quite good and very listenable as an album in its own right, but it does unfortunately lack The Mamas and the Papas’ “Dedicated To The One I Love”, which plays over the end titles to very good effect.