Goran Stolevski hauntingly explores what it means to be an outsider who yearns for human connection. That said: If you can’t handle a little disembowelment, proceed with caution.
By Laura Bradley
A strange kind of poetry lies in the bloody, scratched-up heart of Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone.
The folk horror film about a young witch, which premiered Saturday at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, unfolds in broken language and cautious gestures punctuated by staccato slaps—the kind of callousness that can make the world feel like an interminable, barren pit. But as our taloned protagonist breaks away from the desperate grasp of two overbearing, warring mothers to body swap her way through different ways of living, her jumbled words take on a certain lyricism. Contradictions run through this gorgeously gory film’s veins, its pulse beating through the repetition of two words: And yet, and yet, and yet…
We first meet our young “chosen” witch, Nevena, as an infant in 19th century Macedonia whose mother is frantically pleading with a charred witch bent on taking her away. Playing up the burden of child-rearing and offering up all the other infants in the village doesn’t work, so Nevena’s mother makes another offer to Old Maid Maria: If the witch lets her raise the child, she can take her once she becomes a teenager. That way, she reasons, the witch will not be alone in her old age.
Hlynur Pálmason’s breathtaking portrait of blind faith and evangelism in late 19th-century Iceland is a film of sturdy and stunning beauty.
By Caspar Salmon
After the international acclaim for his second film A White, White Day (2019), Hlynur Pálmason returns with Godland, a film of extraordinary craft and power. The film’s considerable virtues, which range from breathtaking landscape photography to inhabited performances from a flawless cast, show Pálmason to be working at the height of his powers.
Drawing inspiration from late-19th century photos of Icelandic countryfolk taken in a remote outcrop of the island, Godland centres on Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), a Danish priest and amateur photographer who has undertaken a trip across Iceland to establish a parish by the sea. To assist him in his arduous journey, Lucas enlists a Danish-Icelandic translator, various horse-boys, and a rough-edged guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), with whom the mild-mannered preacher enters into a low-simmering feud. The film essentially contains two separate halves, of which the first is the group’s difficult procession through churning rivers and over icy mountains, while the second takes place in the tiny village where Lucas and his remaining acolytes wash up. The film’s subject matter recalls Oscar and Lucinda a little, There Will Be Blood somewhat too, for its tale of single-minded settlers driven to a species of madness. In the case of Godland (the title is bitterly ironic), the crisis comes from the dogma of faith rubbing up against the imperious lawlessness of nature.
Singular debut feature from Irish film-maker Andrew Legge that’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as written by HG Wells
By Donald Clarke
After 20 years of experimental but always entertaining short films about the shape of time and how we may recapture it, Andrew Legge stretches his singular aesthetic into an equally singular feature. Lola perhaps neglects its core personal story as it works hard on the filigree of outer decoration, but, careering home at a breathless 79 minutes, the film cannot be faulted for invention or originality. A cult awaits the Irish film-maker.
The film purports to be composed of footage found at a Sussex mansion inhabited, in the prewar years, by the amateur boffins Martha and Thomasina Hanbury (Stefani Martini and Emma Appleton). Their story suggests The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as written by HG Wells. Toiling in a Mitfordian clutter, they construct a device – dubbed Lola – that can capture radio broadcasts from the future.
Showing the right sort of taste for the protagonists of a science-fiction film, they fall for David Bowie’s music before that artist was even born. They also stan The Kinks and, in a moment that briefly recalls Danny Boyle’s very different Yesterday, introduce an excited world prematurely to (no, not Lola, though the reference is cute) You Really Got Me.
The Hanburys, serious-minded folks, end up devoting most of their time to helping out the Allied war effort with intelligence that beats even that coming via the Enigma machines. Here is where The Sorcerer’s Apprentice kicks in. In its second half the story veers into one of the more familiar byways of alternative history. Constructed with Neil Hannon, whose music effectively captures both familiar musical shapes and genres altered by the young scientists’ well-meaning temporal meddling, the alternative British pop nightmare is worthy of Ken Russell’s Tommy or Peter Watkins’s undervalued Privilege. Few English films have been quite so English. No properly Irish film has hitherto come close.
If there is a downside to the admirable urge to pack so much parallel history into such a small space, it is that the collage somewhat overpowers the women’s personal journey.
Working with vintage film cameras and period lenses, the cinematographer Oona Menges creates images that seem infused with rationed cigarette smoke. But Martha and Thomasina struggle to assert themselves over the assumed click and clank of mid-century projectors.
For all that, Lola seems likely to register with amenable audiences. Legge deserves a second crack at the soonest opportunity.
Viewed with a proverbial pinch of salt, Silvio Narizzano’sGeorgy Girl (1966) is what UK-based media commentator Leanne Weston aptly calls “a comedy of manners turned social critique set amidst the backdrop of ‘Swinging London’”.
It is also, Weston adds in her 2018 essay on the film, “about a world and a girl in transition”, in which the titular character Georgina “Georgy” Parkin (Lynn Redgrave) is portrayed at different times as either “an object of inspiration, affection or ridicule”.
More to the point, though, she is also seen as an object of desire, and it’s this treatment of the protagonist that gives the film’s narrative a sinister undertone as it pretends – in line with The Seekers’ song on which it is partly based – to be a tale about liberation and individualism when in fact, behind its genial facade, it is really one concerning incarceration and servitude.
Or, to put it another way, there’s quite a bit of unpleasant subtext at work in this movie.
Sure – the awkwardly individualistic Georgy has undergone something of a transformation by the end of the film as she achieves what appears to be a form of compromised marital bliss.
But how she gets there does, at times, touch upon the highly dubious.
During the first third of the story, for instance, Georgy’s father’s rich employer James Leamington (James Mason) – a childless businessman who insists he always looked upon her as a daughter while she was growing up in his house – suggests they enter a written contract whereby she becomes his mistress (this while his wife Ellen, played by Rachel Kempson, is dying). Oddly, despite balking at this generous offer to effectively be his whore, by the movie’s conclusion she has ended up marrying the man – an act which allows her, in the words of The Seekers at least, to become “a new Georgy girl”.
Meanwhile, Georgy’s in-residence butler dad Ted (Bill Owen) more or less pimps her off to his boss (admittedly this is only suggested in a brief exchange of dialogue; nevertheless the implication is there), reaffirming his and his wife Doris’ (Clare Kelly) fear that their lone offspring is an awkward loser whose only real hope in life is to attach herself to some well-to-do gent.
And, before she eventually ties the knot with Leamington, the hitherto virginal heroine has an affair with Jos Jones (Alan Bates), who has just married her roommate/best friend Meredith (Charlotte Rampling) after the latter becomes pregnant.
To complicate matters, following the baby’s arrival a bitterly post-natal Meredith – who has already aborted previous pregnancies with Jones – decides she will adopt the infant out, at which point Georgy steps in as the surrogate mother. In effect this not only allows her to strengthen her connection with the soon-to-be divorced father, but also forces her to lie to the UK Government’s social services agency in order to keep her “daughter” Sara (actor unknown).
But when her happy-go-lucky lover irresponsibly throws caution to the wind by quitting his stifling job at the bank, Georgy has to reassess everything and, it’s at this point, she decides the lecherous old Leamington (who’s actually only 49) is the better option. Unfortunately, this development looks like it too may eventually be fraught with difficulty when – just as the newly-weds are being driven away from the church ceremony – her husband’s face seriously drops as it dawns on him that he hasn’t just secured a new (and much younger) squeeze who he has known since she was a baby, but will now have to compete with someone else’s child for his bride’s affections.
Thus, how their life of marital bliss will pan out becomes one of the story’s big unknowns as it’s here that the end credits roll. If anything, it is likely much of the above-mentioned unsavouriness dogging Georgy’s existence will continue as she embarks on what is in no way a certain future.
Mixed message
While this might sound like a grimly sanctimonious interpretation of a movie which, in many ways, tries to pass itself off as a melodramatic comedy, the conclusion is still inescapable – the ugly duckling heroine may have become something of a swan, but she ultimately looks set to remain stranded in the same stagnant pond. Or, to put it bluntly (and contrary to what the plot might otherwise be suggesting), it’s highly unlikely there will ever be a completely satisfactory existence for this woman.
In her above-mentioned essay on the film, which is included in the promotional material accompanying Powerhouse Films Ltd’s Blu-ray release of Georgy Girl, Weston acknowledges it does not treat its leading character “with warmth or hold her in such high regard” as audiences of the day did. Rather, “she is side-lined in her own story”; an interesting observation given Redgrave, in real life (and, one might add, quite unfairly) received third billing behind Mason and Bates.
“From today’s vantage point, Georgy just seems like an ordinary girl: vivacious, flawed, yet lovable – someone we could be friends with,” the critic says. “And that’s what makes the film so interesting.”
Perhaps. However, it’s also arguable that much of the movie’s intrigue stems from the fact its outlook is decidedly brutal. No one in the film, for instance, seems to have a particularly strong moral compass. Furthermore, at the end of its cinematic day, Swinging London is portrayed as a dead end; a place where wanton hedonism may be commonplace, but the privileged class still gets what it wants so long as it’s willing to pay the price. Thus, as a commentary about what was then the emerging youth culture’s attempt to distance itself from a stuffier (read older) generation, Georgy Girl actually turns out to be quite pessimistic.
This begs the question: is this what the film makers – particularly screenwriters Margaret Forster (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and Peter Nichols – set out to do?
Possibly, but it is quite difficult to ascertain as the quirky and upbeat feel of the whole narrative doesn’t seem to have an overtly ironic (or tragic) bone in its bubbly celluloid body.
Interestingly, Redgrave more or less agreed that the film’s portrayal of her character was not exactly positive when being interviewed by journalist Howard Maxford back in 1996.
“George (sic) is quite ruthless really,” she said. “So it is an immoral story, but George was such a survivor that people identified with her.”
Survival, though, comes at a cost – something, it seems, which may have been lost on progressive audiences of the day. As for contemporary viewers who embrace the values of the Me Too movement, they no doubt will find very few redeeming values in this ultimately sexist tale.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Leanne Weston: “Good Girl, Bad Luck: Morality and Performance in Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, pp 5-13
Howard Maxford: “Making Georgy Girl”, Powerhouse Films Ltd promotional booklet, 2018, p 28
