Morvern Callar
Aug. 19th, 2006 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
christopher575Info at imdb
If your boyfriend slashed his wrists in the living room, but left you his bank card and an unpublished novel, would you:
a) Call the police, get the mess cleaned up, and settle his affairs?
b) Live with his body for a week (including jumping over him because he's blocking the kitchen door), hack up his body in the bathtub, bury the pieces, clean up the mess, empty his bank account to take your friend to Ibiza, ditch your friend in the middle of nowhere, sell the novel as your own, collect 100,000 pounds, find your friend again and ask her to leave Scotland with you, and when she says no, say you are going to the bathroom and then disappear?
Samantha Morton's titular Morvern Callar chooses the latter. It's the road less traveled, for obvious reasons, and it takes a certain (sociopath's) mind to choose to do it. Morton's performance makes you get it, though. For the first half hour, you want to call the police yourself, but as you watch her you begin to feel the same disconnect with her life that she feels. Her eyes go from emphatic to empty, and you feel the blood drain from your own heart along with hers. She just isn't all there as she follows bugs around and feels a small tree from root to tip. Her ability to play so distant and detached is perfect in her other movies about the future.
The soundtrack (a mix tape left for her as part of the suicide note) is varied and interesting. My only real gripe about this movie is that half the time they're too quiet, and the other half you can't understand what they're saying. Movies filmed in Scotland should have English subtitles.
If your boyfriend slashed his wrists in the living room, but left you his bank card and an unpublished novel, would you:
a) Call the police, get the mess cleaned up, and settle his affairs?
b) Live with his body for a week (including jumping over him because he's blocking the kitchen door), hack up his body in the bathtub, bury the pieces, clean up the mess, empty his bank account to take your friend to Ibiza, ditch your friend in the middle of nowhere, sell the novel as your own, collect 100,000 pounds, find your friend again and ask her to leave Scotland with you, and when she says no, say you are going to the bathroom and then disappear?
Samantha Morton's titular Morvern Callar chooses the latter. It's the road less traveled, for obvious reasons, and it takes a certain (sociopath's) mind to choose to do it. Morton's performance makes you get it, though. For the first half hour, you want to call the police yourself, but as you watch her you begin to feel the same disconnect with her life that she feels. Her eyes go from emphatic to empty, and you feel the blood drain from your own heart along with hers. She just isn't all there as she follows bugs around and feels a small tree from root to tip. Her ability to play so distant and detached is perfect in her other movies about the future.
The soundtrack (a mix tape left for her as part of the suicide note) is varied and interesting. My only real gripe about this movie is that half the time they're too quiet, and the other half you can't understand what they're saying. Movies filmed in Scotland should have English subtitles.
