Amy Flinders profiles Scottish director Lynne Ramsay in the second of a two-part feature… read part one here.
With three critically acclaimed shorts and a mantelpiece full of awards, Ramsay won another cluster of prizes, including a BAFTA for most promising newcomer, for her first feature Ratcatcher (1999). When asked how the idea of Ratcatcher came to her, Ramsay has said:
‘I remember the dustmen’s strike in the 1970s, and it was quite weird because there were football pitches filled up to the goalposts with rubbish…It was also the time when punk rock was starting and the Labour government was coming to an end, so there was a depression and an excitement in the air…So it started off with a place of deterioration with something new happening with a boy caught up in a very macho environment – he’s quite sensitive, but he’s not supposed to show it. It felt like a beautiful backdrop for that.’
And almost miraculously, Ramsay does manage to turn a grey, deprived, 1970s Glasgow – every corner of which is packed with overflowing bin bags – into a oddly beautiful setting as the narrative follows twelve-year-old James after he plays a part in the accidental drowning of one of his friends. James must deal with the guilt that arises from this inadvertent act, which makes his developing adolescence an even more uncomfortable and turbulent experience.
Whilst Ratcatcher seems purposefully slow as time plods uncertainly along for James, each shot is as engaging as the last as Ramsay repeatedly captures a profound sense of emotion from seemingly still, small moments. Ratcatcher is a film for more than just the eyes and ears, as some of the images on screen are projected so intensely you can almost feel them. For example, when James first meets his new friend Margaret, he touches her grubby, grazed knee and we witness that first awkward spark between them that lingers in the friendship they have throughout the film. In another scene, James notices a hole in the toe of his sleeping mothers stocking. In Ramsay’s words,
‘He’s always wanting her to be perfect, so he tries to pull the toe of the tights up, so she hasn’t got this hole. For me it says about how he loves her; a tiny detail that says something about their relationship.’
James fantasizes about the perfect family and the perfect home and Ramsay again creates a profound contrast between the character’s dreams and the bleak reality of the narrative. James takes a trip one day to an empty building site of clean, brand new, partially built homes, his dream being that one day his family will move in to one. James climbs out the window of one of the houses into brilliantly sunny cornfield, the director again using this environment to represent her character breaking free from his hostile constraints.
The film includes a nod to a director much admired by Ramsay, Terence Malik. In a scene where James’ sweet but slightly simple friend Kenny ties his pet mouse to a balloon, the song Musik Für Kinder, a song repeatedly used in the film Badlands (arguably Malik’s most famous work) plays on the soundtrack as the red balloon floats into the sky, a symbol also used in Malik’s film. James seems tragically adult-like as he later tells Kenny that his mouse is dead and hasn’t landed on the moon. Perhaps James is gradually losing his innocence after the various incidents in his life, much like Anne-Marie in Small Deaths.
Her second feature, Morvern Callar (2002) , takes a different tone as Ramsay moves from representing childhood and the notion of families sticking together, to portraying the life of a very solitary individual in an adult world. Morvern (Samantha Morton, the first time the director has used a well known, professional actor) wakes up one morning to find that her boyfriend has killed himself. In his suicide note, he asks her to take his newly finished novel to a publisher and to pay for the funeral with the money on his credit card. Instead, Morvern publishes the novel under her own name and uses the money to splash out on a holiday to Spain with her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott).
Unlike the Alan Warner novel from which Morvern Callar is adapted, the film has no interior monologue or any access to Morvern’s thoughts. On altering the quantity of speech for the film Ramsay has said,
‘The monologue in the book, well, she never explained her actions. It’s quite existential. I was open to the idea but I wrote it without the monologue and described the actions visually, because most of them were, and it really worked. It had a real atmosphere to it.’
Instead of using her raw amalgamation of sound and images to depict the nit-ridden hair and grazed knees of childhood, she adapts her sensual style to portray Morvern’s more seductive, adult world. In a scene where Morvern goes to a party for example, Ramsay occasionally moves the images out of focus whilst the scene dips in and out of slow motion while the sound and dialogue remain at normal speed, expertly capturing the party’s ambience and perhaps the sensation of being under the influence of alcohol or drugs. She uses the same technique in her earlier short, Gasman, but on that occasion to portray the energy and excitement of a children’s party, proving that Ramsay’s techniques are not limited in the environments they can represent and atmospheres they can create.
Although the film received a number of awards, including a double win at Cannes in 2002, and yet more acclaim and recognition for its director, it has been argued that it is not as strong a piece of work as her first feature. In an interview with her, British director Mike Leigh said he thought that there was ‘a quality in Ratcatcher and the shorts that somehow doesn’t survive in Morvern Callar.’
One criticism of the film has been that the title character is perhaps a bit too emotionally distant and not particularly easy to identify with. Ramsay has commented that,
‘Morvern Callar‘s a really weird film, in a sense, where I was trying to experiment with taking things in a different direction, and it kind of half works and it half doesn’t. And I kind of felt with that film that perhaps I should have pushed it more into the realms of black comedy slightly.’
In February 2001, Ramsay was hired to write and direct an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. The book had not been completed at this point, but eighteen months later Sebold’s novel had spent numerous weeks at the top of The New York Times best sellers list, and Hollywood began to show an interest. Ramsay has said of the project,
‘…it was one of those situations where I was given the manuscript of a novel that wasn’t finished. There was something interesting in it, I thought. It was set in America, which I felt was a big leap, but it wasn’t attached to any studio deal – it had been passed by everybody for being too dark. But the bottom line was that the book came out and became a massive bestseller. And it was also such a well-loved book that I didn’t want everyone talking about the difference between the book and the film.’
She left the production in 2004 and the film eventually went to Peter Jackson to direct (his adaptation will be out in UK cinemas at the end of this month).
Since her departure from the production of The Lovely Bones, Ramsay has directed a music video for the single ‘Black and White Town‘ by indie-rock band Doves. Her distinct style is as prevalent in this as it was in her features and shorts, as she again implements her ability to accurately capture the energy and frustrations of youth, a skill that will most probably be exercised in her latest project, an adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Lionel Shriver has stated that she wants the filmmakers to ‘look beyond the novel’s thriller aspects’. If she wants a filmmaker that can look beyond the surface material and dig deep to expose the core meaning and emotion of the text, then Lynne Ramsay is the director to do it. Hopefully the film’s release will see the Guardian-voted ‘world’s 12th best film director’ bounce back onto the big screen to the critical acclaim she is used to, and thoroughly deserves.
Amy Flinders
