Outside Tension

Thousand-yard stare: Morvern (Samantha Morton) zones out.

Morvern Callar is a tragedy in exterior shots.

by Cindy Fuchs

Everything is still, except for the blinking Christmas tree lights. They’re relentless, those lights. Next to the decorated tree lies a body, face down. Blood from his slashed wrists spatters the floor. And next to him, so close and still that at first she seems dead as he, lies his girlfriend, Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton). She’s discovered his body this Christmas morning. And now she’s unable to move.

Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, which she and Liana Dognini adapted from Alan Warner's 1995 novel, doesn't tell you much about Morvern's thinking. As embodied by the stunning Samantha Morton, who appears to be making a career of playing opaque, luminescent characters (see also: the mute girlfriend in Sweet and Lowdown, the dead girlfriend in Jesus' Son and the gifted, watery pre-cog in Minority Report), Morvern is equal parts fragile and coarse. Her eyes take in everything, and reveal a kind of rawness that's hard to read.

Morvern is the puzzle the film picks at but never quite solves, the focus of its probing but respectful attention. She cries when she's alone, for instance, in the tub, her body crumpled and turned away from the hovering camera. Perhaps feeling she has nowhere to go, unsure what she wants, Morvern persists, game somehow, or maybe just numb. She looks occasionally at the body, her eyes wide, as if wondering what she might do about it.

That evening, Christmas night, she opens her brightly wrapped presents, alone in the room with the body. She has a leather jacket, a lighter, a Walkman and a mixtape assembled by her lover: "Music For You." Each object might say something about her dead boyfriend, maybe even about her. She flicks the lighter, then puts on the headphones and listens, the tracks simultaneously merging with and disguising her feelings, so that they seem to translate her shock, grief and anger, but then again, maybe they don't: Can's "I Want More," Aphex Twin's "Goon Gumpas," Boards of Canada's "Everything You Do Is a Balloon." Fragmented and throbbing, the music fills the soundtrack, as Morvern gives herself over to it.

She dresses up and heads to a party with her vibrant friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). When someone asks after Morvern's "Dostoevsky," she says only that he's home, in the kitchen, not exactly a lie. They dance, get high, exchange looks with pretty boys. When a couple of girls strip off their bras in the crowd, Morvern looks away in embarrassment. But later that evening, when she and Lanna go carousing with a couple of boys in their car, she hangs out the window and turns her face to the rushing night air: wordless and exultant.

Separated from the group as they continue to party in the woods, Morvern stands at the side of a river, briefly caught by the flashlight beam of a passing boatman: She lifts her skirt, shows her panties and garters. The iris of light stays on her as the boat moves on, until she drops her skirt again. This wordless exchange, at a distance, sets the limit of Morvern's self-exposure -- a bit of pale flesh, glimpsed from the perspective of someone you'll never know.

Morvern resists her sense of abandonment (she tells Lanna her boyfriend is "gone" and never coming back) by moving. She's found a note on the computer: "Sorry Morvern. Don't try to understand. It just seemed like the right thing to do." Whether or not she does try is hard to tell. Though he's left money for his funeral, Morvern disposes of the body herself, dismembering it in the bathtub as The Velvet Underground's "I'm Sticking With You" perks along in her headphones. "'Cause I'm made out of glue," she hears, framed in the narrow bathroom doorway, sunglasses protecting her eyes from the spurting blood. She uses the money to take Lanna on a trip to Spain. On the road, the girls leave behind, for a short time anyway, their grinding jobs at a Glasgow supermarket. But while the trip -- including hotel rooms and sunny days poolside -- delights Lanna, it leaves Morvern cold. The girls are growing apart. Like Ramsay's first feature, Ratcatcher, or even her prize-winning short films (a trilogy, included on Criterion's Ratcatcher DVD), Morvern Callar respects surfaces, lets viewers "know" what and how they might. Morvern's not so much an enigma as a reflection, of a set of moments and desires.

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