Verdict
Summary
From director Lynne Ramsay, Morvern Callar is sometimes an impenetrable film with an elusive stance on who the main character is because of how she behaves and is presented.Fun City’s Blu-ray looks and sounds excellent and it’s made me curious enough to want to pay attention to what else they’re releasing.
Plot:
A grieving woman leaves her life behind and starts over with lies.
Review:
It’s Christmas Eve and Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) wakes up to find that her boyfriend has committed suicide, leaving her a note on the computer to “be brave” and to see that he’s left her some presents for Christmas. One of the presents that he’s left her is his finished novel and instructs her to try submitting it to some publishers on a list he’s prepared. She lies next to the bloody mess her boyfriend has left for her to clean up, entering into a deep funk, and she goes out to celebrate Christmas with her only friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), her coworker at the local supermarket, not revealing the grisly scene back at her apartment. Morvern goes about her life as if nothing has happened, and it goes on this way for a couple of days. She uses her boyfriend’s bank card to withdraw enough money to book her and Lanna a little vacation in Spain, but before they go, Morvern cleans her apartment, cuts her boyfriend’s body into pieces, and buries his remains somewhere in the Scottish highlands where nobody will ever discover them. Also, she mails off a copy of her boyfriend’s novel to a publisher, but she switches the authorship to herself on a whim. While in Spain on a bacchanal with Lanna, she hears back from the publisher: They want to publish it, and are willing to pay her 100K for it. Her vacation turns into a strange journey of self-transformation as she literally gets lost in the desert, coming to a point where she totally assumes a new version of herself, but is she a sociopath?
From director Lynne Ramsay, Morvern Callar is sometimes an impenetrable film with an elusive stance on who the main character is because of how she behaves and is presented. Morton plays her with the camera often very close to her face, trying to crack her code, and the film never gives into how we’re supposed to feel about her. Therein lies the film’s ultimate flaw or conundrum: The movie’s heart is mysterious and aloof, and so the film feels like it’s missing some bones and has some crews loose in its wiring. Morton has a lot of appeal as an actress: I’ve enjoyed her very much in films like Sweet and Lowdown where she had no lines and conveyed her sweet heart without a single line of dialogue, and I loved her in Code 46, and she’s definitely compelling here, but who is she playing? What is going on in that head of hers? We’ll never know, and I suspect that was Ramsay’s intention, especially since I’ve seen other movies by Ramsay and she tends to have a mantra where she focuses on characters who can never be understood.
Fun City Editions recently released a Blu-ray edition of Morvern Callar, and it comes in a new 2K restoration, with a newly recorded audio commentary by film historians, a new video essay, and trailers.
