Ray Pride

Lynne Ramsay's second feature, "Morvern Callar," is the kind of film to drive lit-minded (and literal-minded) critics up against the wall.

But this haunting almost-a-masterpiece, drawn from Alan Warner's dizzying 1995 novel of the same name, is a triumph of a different sort than such a viewer might expect, capturing the essence of a tale, its mood and emotion, more than merely the lovely bones of narrative. Movies aren't texts and plots; at their best, they're pretexts to eavesdrop on behavior or to see through the eyes of a perceptive artist. And adaptations are not projects for the pedantically bookish; the most intriguing adaptations come when a director and her team--screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, music supervisor--find an unlikely and gratifying way to fashion someone else's material to their sensibility.

"Autistic" and "childlike" are two of the infectiously enthusiastic 32-year-old director's favorite adjectives for both the run-at-the-mouth fiction and the behavior of her character, played by Samantha Morton. Morvern is a chain-smoking, 21-year-old supermarket clerk in a small, seaside West Scotland town. Her boyfriend commits suicide, resting in a streak of darkening blood on the kitchen floor. She opens his Christmas presents to her, pops in a mix tape he's left for her. After a night out with her best friend, Lanna, she finds he's left her money and his unpublished novel.

What's a girl to do? In the case of Morvern, she places her name on the title page and ships the printout to a big London publisher, gets rid of the body, and lights off with Lanna on a package holiday to southern Spain. Lost on the dance floor and otherwise in search of some modest measure of human intimacy, her holiday's interrupted by a visit from the publishers, who, over champagne, offer a staggering amount of money for her "brilliant" book.

Ramsay is the rare director who understands how to shoot nightlife, much like Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien. She has a photographer's knack for capturing the blush and blur of glimpse in an intoxicated instant. Ramsay and recurrent cinematographer Alwin Kuchler construct a remarkable emotional subjectivity, a shimmering use of focus and focal length that disorient our perception at just the right moment. You get the sensation of presence and absence, admiring how she can capture what it feels like to be in a room.

And Morton's face can move vertiginously from elation to lack of emotion. She's a modern incarnation of silent-era actors who were born ready for their close-up. Is Morvern opaque or inhuman? Is the story nihilist or one lacking a discernible moral stance? Just watch the face.

On a brusque October afternoon, we sit outside a Rush Street Starbucks so Ramsay can have a smoke or four. "How do I get this across, this character, who's almost autistic?" she muses in her fast, dense Scots accent. "Details get in her way. Something Alan Warner said that struck me was that the minute she commits the first banal act, after the death, she loses herself, she shuts down. I always saw her as a character who was very pragmatic, and who didn't analyze herself. When she put her name on the novel in the book, I thought, `Wow, that's kind of quite punk rock, you know.' I love the fact that Warner kills the author on the first page, then you go to the supermarket, and [Morvern] takes over. I thought that was a stroke of genius. And I like the identity play, where she takes over his identity."

Ramsay thinks Warner is a man who "writes a woman really well." I took something else from the picture: how Morvern was a muse to the writer. The boyfriend was inspired by her, and he wrote this novel for her, a tribute to her, to who she is. But then what we observe is essentially an unknowable person, an unknowable woman. We watch thoughts flicker, eloquent but mute, across Samantha's face. Here's someone who's supposed to have inspired a writer, but we have to invent her, project our need for a muse onto her just as he did.

"Yeah, I think that's a really good interpretation," she says, talking faster. "In terms of being a muse? I think I saw him probably as a writer, an intellectual, who maybe saw something nonacademic from her, drawing something different from her. She's a muse who takes over, you know. That's what's fantastic. I think he's learned from her. But then she takes that back, while in the same process, losing her identity."

You don't want to imagine another actor in the role. There's a shot at the end of Morvern's conversation with the two publishers who want to make her rich. Ramsay holds on her face, and all this remarkable stuff is going on, quicksilver changes of mood, then another mood. Then another. "Oh yeah, that was great," Ramsay says, a smile almost as wide as she is tall. "When I shot that scene, I knew she'd nailed it. I think she really understood that, and so did I. I've been in a very similar situation myself. I'd done one short film [in 1996], `Small Deaths,' and it won a prize at Cannes, I was like this kid just out of film school. It was the first film I directed, Cannes was the first film festival I went to, which is a bit weird in the first place!"

Nowhere to go but down. "Exactly!" Ramsay says with a throaty laugh. "People were asking, what's your next film? And me kind of like busking it. Whatever I said, they'd go, `Wow, that's interesting.'

"Morvern Callar" opens January 31 at Landmark Century.

(2003-01-22)

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