Review: One Screening Only
God Help the Girl (Stuart Murdoch, UK, 2013, 111 min)
WUD Film Mini-Indie Fest, Union South Marquee Theater, Sunday, November 23, 3:30pm»
Youthful exuberance abounds in God Help the Girl from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. It’s an undeniably charming and harmlessly entertaining twee pastiche musical that could learn a few more lessons from its predecessors.
Maybe because of its youthful exuberance, I ended up thinking about time and aging quite a bit while watching God Help the Girl, the quasi-musical from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. I’m getting old, and this movie was not made for me. I was often caught up in its undeniable charm, but I couldn’t help think about the films (and music videos) that Murdoch seems to want to make here. At times I wished that I were 20 years old and could watch this with fresh eyes and probably be excited about it; at other times I was glad that I could see it for what it is, a harmlessly entertaining twee pastiche. As the credits rolled I had to make a decision: should I write this review as a kool kid or a grumpy old man. I’ll try to balance the two perspectives. God Help the Girl has many things to recommend it, and for the most part I appreciated its efforts to forge a new space for mellow indie pop in the movie musical. I’m confident it will play well to the Mini-Indie crowd on Sunday, many of whom won’t have better antecedents triggered in their memories as they watch it.
Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) stars as Eve, a young, depressed anorexic who wants to be a singer/songwriter. Over the opening credits she escapes from her hospital room to wander to a Glasgow club, where she first sees James (Olly Alexander, Le Week-End) a top-buttoned shirt acoustic guitar player fighting with his drummer for being too loud. When Eve permanently (but against her doctor’s advice) leaves the hospital, she looks up James, and discovers that he gives guitar lessons to Cassie (Hannah Murray, Gilly from Game of Thrones). The trio then embark on a general plan to form a band with Eve. Prematurely, however, Eve has recorded her own demo tape for her favorite local DJs, and attempted to get it to them through tall and handsome Anton (Pierre Boulanger) who is about to appear on their radio show with his own band. I think you know perfectly well which guy is going to stay in the “friend zone.” But Eve does begin to thrive with James and Cassie as her remaining supply of anti-depressants begins to dwindle.
An image kept popping in my head as I watched Eve, James, and Cassie be so effortlessly young: Arthur, Franz and Odile dancing the Madison in Godard’s Band of Outsiders. It’s a much-imitated sequence, most recently recreated at the end of Le Week-End as the long-married couple recapture a moment from their youth.
In a sense, Murdoch spends most of God Help the Girl trying to capture that kind of moment again and again. Sometimes he succeeds, and I started to appreciate how important the mise-en-scene was to create that sense of youthful vivaciousness, particularly costumes and props. Before Eve moves into a small room in James’s flat, he jokes that she has a particularly large bag, and she responds that everything she owns is in it. But it soon we discover that Eve, Cassie, and even James seem to have an infinite variety of clothes, all of which convey the right hipster pop sensibility. That sounds sarcastic, but the costumes are just as important here as they are in most classic musicals. Realistic? No. Genre appropriate? Yes.
The question then becomes whether lightweight indie pop can provide enough punch to drive the musical sequences. Here again, my mind tended to wander to Murdoch’s predecessors. In particular, I thought about the more narratively driven longer-form music videos directed by Julien Temple, like David Bowie’s Jazzin’ for Blue Jean (see the short version here) or The Kinks’ “Come Dancing.” My favorite music sequence, “I’ll Have to Dance with Cassie,” has many of the hallmarks of a Temple video one might have seen on MTV in 1989: integration of diegetic sound and the song; interplay between the lyrics and action; and multiple planes of action and dancing.
I loved Julien Temple videos back then (and I found myself clicking repeat on the clip above, it is completely charming). So I can imagine a twenty-something finding several of the God Help the Girl sequences just as eye-opening and innovative, given the state of current music videos, let alone movie musicals. I mean, who in their twenties even knows what I’m talking about with this comparison? My problem, however, is not just that I am old, but that not all of the music sequences are equally interesting, musically, lyrically, or visually. Some of this, granted, is taste. But by the end of the nearly two-hour running time, Murdoch runs out of specific visual ideas for the music sequences and seems to go on auto-pilot, allowing Browning to just lip-sync in hallways in canted angle shots, for example.
Murdoch is fortunate to have assembled such a charming, charismatic cast. I remember thinking that Browning was the only reason to watch Sucker Punch, so I’m glad that she found a vehicle for her unique screen presence. Murray gives one-hundred percent in what is basically a thankless role; just watch her eyes in the clip above to get a sense of the energy she brings to every scene. And as much as you want to smack his character upside the head once in a while (like when James pines for Eve in the too-twee-for-words “Pretty Eve in the Tub”), Alexander provides a well-needed range of emotions in a film that often plays the same emotional note.
Now that I’m coming to the end of the review, I have to admit that I think I’ve played the clip above more than ten times as I wrote this. Its energy and playfulness is undeniable, and it is not the only such sequence in God Help the Girl, making it well worth checking out (and it should play better big, loud, and with a crowd at Mini-Indie). And Murdoch fans will probably enjoy the film more than I did (and yes, I understand that “God Help the Girl” is a separate project with its own history…or at least I did once I looked it up, like an old man). The film as a whole, however, still prompted me to look up and watch its predecessors, which is not necessarily what a genre film should want to do.
