Encountering Morvern Callar

The past five days I've attended every session of the Fantastic Film Festival at Lido (excluding repeat screenings). I've been logging reviews of each film on my Letterboxd account.

Now in our third year of attendance, one thing is certain and that is that this festival will always involve rail replacement buses. Lots of them. One could be indignant but to be honest being a committed public transport user in Melbourne means accepting the fact it will be a bit crap and focusing one's energy on more constructive things.

So far it's been eight films in those five days, which is quite a lot. This pace is going to continue for a few days yet. Aside from the impact on my middle-aged hip flexors and associated bits, this is a good amount of movie-watching. It's sufficient to make these weeks feel like differently-marked time, and so makes for a nice mental holiday.

One film I do want to write about here is Morvern Callar (2002). It is about a young woman, Morvern, who makes a few odd decisions after her boyfriend commits suicide. Morvern was played by Samantha Morton who is about my age, and I found the character easy to relate to. She reminded me of young me. This is something that doesn't happen very often.

I feel like coming-of-age story writers went from protagonising tortured young men to realising they were ignoring young women and then overcompensating by portraying all young women as plucky, clever and decisive. Neither held much relevancy for young me, but at the time I probably felt more drawn to the tortured young men.

Morvern, on the other hand, is mousey, passive and oblivious, just like young me (I am a lot more confident now, but all of that is still in there). She is not admirable but I understand her. I do think I would have benefited from seeing parts of myself represented in stories at that time, for the good of my own self-awareness.

I don't think filmmakers are making character studies like this anymore. It feels very Gen X and people are making films about different young people now (I enjoy those movies too when they're good). But I feel as though my own ship has sailed, which is why Morvern Callar was so unexpected.

Morvern Callar is based on a book of the same name, so I suppose I now need to find a copy.