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God Help the Girl
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| Year: |
2014
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Director: |
Stuart Murdoch
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| Stars: |
Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, Hannah Murray, Pierre Boulanger, Cora Bisset, Sarah Swire, Mark Radcliffe, Stuart Maconie, Ann Scott-Jones, Josie Long, Pauline King, Kath Howden, Alex Klobouk, Paul Flanagan, Michael Drum, Michael M.
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| Genre: |
Musical, Comedy, Drama, Romance |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
In spite of being incarcerated in a mental hospital for her own good, anorexic depressive Eve (Emily Browning) isn't entirely sure she needs to be there, or maybe she just doesn't want to be there, which dictates her actions this evening as she climbs out of the building through an open window and escapes into the Glasgow night. What she wants with her life is not to be ill, but to be a songwriter, heck, she can even sing her compositions, so the obvious destination is a nightclub where a band are playing, led by charismatic Swiss-German frontman Anton (Pierre Boulanger) who makes a point of embracing her as he leaps around the stage and into the audience. But Eve's choices are not always the best for her - she really needs to do something about that.
God Help the Girl was quickly labelled the hipster musical the nanosecond it was announced as a film, drawn from an album by Belle and Sebastian, the Scottish indie band just as likely to enrage as they were to charm. Stuart Murdoch was the man behind them both, and his music was often decreed to be overly twee by the tastemakers, with its guitar-based pop tunes mixing sunshine melody with a deceptively quaint melancholy and occasional bite, so you had the impression it was that combination he was aiming for in his directorial debut. Predictably, this was simply too niche to catch on no matter its publicity making it look like a film for everyone: try that trick and you run the risk of pleasing no one.
In fact, though this did come across as a first feature with all the flaws that can present, chief among them not knowing what to keep in and what to leave out to strengthen the narrative, if you responded to Belle and Sebastian you would doubtless find much to like here. That storyline followed the formation of a band, one which lasts a whole summer in a coming of age tale for twentysomethings (or indeed older) whose coming of age never arrived, or at least arrived rather late. Eve is psychologically damaged which ran the risk of a character who romanticised mental illness, sadly not an issue exclusive to indie movies, and it was true when Browning was skipping around lipsyncing to her songs you had to wonder whether Murdoch was getting to grips with a sobering subject.
It wasn't quite as offputting a take on it as a previous Browning film Sucker Punch, but did have its heart in the right place as it attempted to empower a young woman who if she did not fight back against something would simply be caught up in a cycle of hospital stays and self-inflicted harm on the occasions she was released. She meets James (Olly Alexander), a lifeguard around her own age much given to spouting nuggets of pop music wisdom, all in the service of moves towards creating his own tunes, though Eve is so prodigiously talented (composing and singing songs by the director, so maybe the film was a tad biased) that he hardly need bother, he just has to follow where she leads musically. Add the rich girl with just as much free time he is teaching guitar to, Cassie (Hannah Murray) and what do you know? We had a band on our hands.
This trio like nothing better than, no, not performing, more hanging around shooting the breeze for a directionless, vague air it doesn't quite capitalise on since we have to know Eve is getting better if only by increments to make the experience worthwhile. She falls for the self-centered Anton who is supposed to get her songs to a pair of DJs (actual pair of DJs Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, heard but not seen) but as we suspect is more interested in bedding her, which she goes along with as the boy who actually could do her some romantic good - that'll be James - languishes as strictly a pal, possibly the most realistic aspect of the whole movie. As for the ditties, Murdoch said he was influenced by A Hard Day's Night and the music films of the sixties, but more precisely he seems to be trying to capture the very specific dance sequence in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part and have it last an entire feature. Drawing to a bittersweet close, with Glasgow depicted as both like and not quite like itself, was it damning with faint praise to call it "nice"? Because the grimmer elements were self-consciously swamped in quaintness.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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