Carol Morley 2006 UK
Starring: Maxine Peake, Melanie Beckley, Miranda Colmans, Jeremy Tiang
Carol Morley is a slightly odd presence in the world of cinema. Despite having directed 12 films over the space of 21 years she came to features late (2010), producing a number of shorts yet never quite committing herself to one particular style, genre or topic. Starting out with 16mm and fiction she first showed a penchant for melodrama then went entirely in the other direction in 1993's Secondhand Daylight, featuring no more than a group of teenagers in a fast-food restaurant talking about their feelings. 1994's I'm Not Here meanwhile was a documentary about the inherent ignorance in customer service that had been inspired by a letter Sir Alec Guinness once wrote to The Times. Perhaps the most striking (and certainly the longest) of this period was 2000's The Alcohol Years, a lacerating portrait of Morley's own life between the ages of 16 and 21, five years that she insists she remembers almost nothing of clearly. Over the years certain obsessions have of course made themselves known with missing people (the disappeared, those in self-imposed exile and even everyday citizens who feel invisible) possibly the most prevalent and the topic of her most famous work, 2011's docudrama Dreams Of A Life, about Joyce Carol Vincent, the now-notorious young woman whose death was only discovered three years after the fact when her skeleton was found in her flat, the rest of her having melted into the carpet, relatives, friends and lovers having either not noticed, or not cared enough to look into, her disappearance. Most recently Morley has made The Falling, arguably her most accessible film to date but actually a continuation/expansion of the subject of her 2006 short The Madness Of The Dance. With Madness she again spans genres with ease but here with more success than in other cases. As it opens the film appears to be firmly based within horror, or at least horror in a similar way to Peter Strickland's knowing, psychosexual meta-chiller Berberian Sound Studio, with the chaotic house of a character only named as The Professor shot through red filters as if it's an old-school photo lab or at the very least has been furnished by a part-time Satanist. The credits crawl across the screen to the accompaniment of hissing and screeching cats, shatter, fall away as the wonderful Maxine Peake's quiet, breathless voice takes over on narration, the twist being that her dialogue throughout (in the guise of The Professor) is actually a treatise on mass hysterical mania that she is speaking into a Dictaphone, the minimal plot nearer to documentary than anything else. And to a level the film is a documentary and is informative and engaging throughout but as she tells us about true cases of nuns compelled to bite each other (and the camera), schoolgirls whose legs twitch one after the other and Chinamen who believe their genitals are disappearing the sufferers appear on screen, surround and overcome her, are overlaid and projected onto the walls of her dingy flat. She reacts to them, steps around their fallen bodies, is visibly claustrophobic in her armchair as they envelop her. As the narrative progresses she grows more relaxed in their presence, her speech becomes stronger and more confident. Except they don't see or hear her and continue as if they're ghosts still inhabiting their now-rebuilt former home and carrying on as before, blind to their new surroundings. To them she doesn't exist and maybe she doesn't, maybe she's just another of Morley's isolated protagonists paddling through her own troubled subconscious or maybe she's simply our obliging TV presenter, her interest in her theme engulfing her thoughts and actions. But who is her report aimed at? Is it the work of a medical official, for the consumption of students, for us, for her own piece of mind? At one point she speaks of a particular set of sufferers having an aversion to red suggesting the possibility that the early filters are actually The Professor's special choice of lighting, installed to ward away the compulsions she can't admit to and that may not have any basis in physical reality anyway. Later there's a cut between scenes and the silence is broken by the sound of a can being opened and The Professor taking a swig as we're told about several girls inexplicably affected by a new fizzy drink. One collapses on her desk, the drink she's holding spilling into a puddle on the classroom floor. Nobody responds. Before too long The Professor too twitches, swears, bellows, talks about one group dancing themselves to death as if they're characters in the original version of a fairytale, relates the suspicion that a wronged fox goddess is behind an outbreak one minute and has the ears of such a creature the next. Finally she gives in (or is she just keeping up with the Joneses?) and leads the other characters in a musical sequence before dancing with them after a final glimpse at the camera. It's a fascinating spectacle regardless of intent, more troubling, intelligent and, at least in my opinion, better than anything else in Morley's oeuvre. I haven't seen The Falling yet but received a copy this morning. Having seen the official trailer though it somehow doesn't appear to touch the eerie vigour of Madness. Or perhaps I'm being too judgemental. We shall have to wait and see.
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