Emily Browning – Bitch Flicks

‘God Help The Girl’: Sunny Glasgow Hosts a Twee Musical

The songs allow the audience access to the inner minds of the characters, which is especially helpful for a secretive character like Eve. The songs swirl into a beautiful world where shining girls dance through the streets of Glasgow like it’s their own personal playground, always dressed for a costume party in enviable vintage. Songs cut into elaborate sequences of the band playacting on golden hills in school uniforms and battling with umbrellas on courthouse steps, that seem like mini-music videos. The film is so stuffed with beauty and whimsy that it often seems hard to make room for the parts of the story that are truly ugly.

A poster for God Help The Girl which recalls Belle and Sebastian album covers — A poster for *God Help The Girl,* which recalls Belle and Sebastian album covers

The word ”twee” is generally used as a pejorative but there’s no other way to describe God Help The Girl.

Like pornography, it’s hard to define what is twee, but you know it when you see it. Pressed to explain it, there are a few reliable touchstones: striped scarves (preferably homemade), outdated mediums like vinyl and cassettes, the films of Miranda July and of course, the music of Belle and Sebastian, the legendary Scottish band led by Stuart Murdoch, God Help The Girl’s director and mastermind.

In his book, Twee: the Gentle Revolution, writer Marc Spitz explains twee as an artistic movement centering on outsiders, telling stories whose serious or even cynical core is hidden by bright colours, sweet pop songs and a general sense of buoyancy, like a sugar cookie laced with arsenic. Think of the pastel confections produced by Wes Anderson; each feature tragic deaths but they’re not what we remember. Likewise, God Help The Girl has a serious story, following Emily Browning’s Eve on her slow recovery from anorexia and depression, yet it never becomes an “issue movie.” Instead, it’s a pastiche of quirky film references and self-aware wit, all swinging to a host of bouncy, jangly pop songs.

The Band: Cassie, James and Eve pose in their best clothes

God Help The Girl began as Murdoch’s side project, conceived as a 60s girl-group, a soundtrack for the film that didn’t yet exist. The songs, which told the story of a young woman, named Eve entering into a difficult adulthood, were recorded by female vocalists as God Help the Girl back in 2009 and are covered by the cast members in the film.

It begins with Eve (Browning) escaping from a psychiatric ward to go listen to a band she likes. As part of her recovery she begins writing music as way to deal with her feelings. Throughout the film, she improvises songs about her life, simple observations about her day-to-day concerns, forming an amazing soundtrack, that teeters between whimsy and melancholy.

Things pick up when she meets James (Olly Alexander), an under-appreciated musician looking for an identity and Cassie (Hannah Murray playing a version of her Skins character), an outcast who goes to “the posh school” in town. The three misfits are drawn together by their shared love of music, and form a band in a bright, sunny Glasgow, far from the grey rainy days most North Americans imagine.

The core band recruit musicians to form their desired pop sound

The music is well-integrated into the story–no surprise, as the story was written around the songs. The songs allow the audience access to the inner minds of the characters, which is especially helpful for a secretive character like Eve. Late in the film, James mentions that he learned all about Eve’s past and her eating disorder through listening to her songs, the only place where she fully exposes herself. Indeed, though she seems to be a strong and self-possessed young woman, Eve can be closed off and defensive. Like James, we only gain insight into her character when she sings.

Like the 60s pop musicals it tries to emulate, the plot of God Help The Girl is essentially a vehicle to get from song to song. It works because everyone involved seems to have such faith in the material. The actors seems to feel the emotions in the songs they sing and the chemistry between the core trio is palatable. Most important, is the film’s function as an ode to art’s power to help us heal, an idea Murdoch appears to evangelize.

The group perform an impromptu dance, reminiscent of French New Wave

The film is peppered with a dizzying array of surreal visual jokes, like Maria Von Trapp, guitar case in hand, joining the line of musicians, a newspaper that proclaims itself the choice for geniuses and The Smiths’ Meat is Murder t-shirt Eve wears as she sings about cutting meat out of her diet. Dance sequences recall French New Wave classics and in many scenes, the humour recalls the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, such as the band being chased through the streets.

The songs swirl into a beautiful world where shining girls dance through the streets of Glasgow like it’s their own personal playground, always dressed for a costume party in enviable vintage. Songs cut into elaborate sequences of the band playacting on golden hills in school uniforms and battling with umbrellas on courthouse steps, that seem like mini-music videos. The film is so stuffed with beauty and whimsy that it often seems hard to make room for the parts of the story that are truly ugly.

Many artistically shot sequences throughout the film seem to be mini-music videos

For all the talk of Eve’s health problems, the film sure does make her thinness appealing. Though she mentions she carries everything she owns in her backpack, she has a massive, stunning wardrobe, full of skin-tight outfits that would only work on a rail-thin body and would make great thinspo for those sadly inclined. Though she left the hospital before she was deemed recovered, Eve seems to have no self-confidence issues or need to hide her weight as expected in someone with anorexia. She also mentions being happy with the size of her breasts and is comfortable beings seen naked and having sex, all of which don’t appear characteristic of a severe anorexic who quite recently had difficulty having a full meal with her shrunken stomach. Also unusual is the fact that we never see her eat. Though several songs mention her refusal to eat and her desire to recover, we never get the satisfaction of seeing her take a bite.

Each day, she counts out and takes pills for other unspecified mental health problems but the film avoids any real discussion of what else is wrong with her and of her past. We learn she left her home in Australia to follow a boy to Scotland, which hints at further mental instability but it is never elaborated on. It appears as if Murdoch figured the visual iconography of Eve holding her pills in her hands and looking sad would enough to show the depth of the character’s depression. Ultimately, Eve’s problems are boiled down to her inability to live in the adult world.

Befitting of the twee genre, God Help The Girl is tonally inconsistent, going from sappy to silly in the blink of an eye. It often feels over-long and self indulgent, as some scenes drag on longer than they should have. It’s clear Murdoch is in love with his own story and expects us to want to spend as much time in its world as he’ll allow us. Likewise, it can often be a bit too precious. It’s easy to see how it could turn some off, induce toothaches, that sort of thing, in the viewer that isn’t ready to surrender to it’s sweet sweet glory.

Eve, Cassie, and James are the sort of characters mentioned in Belle and Sebastian songs come to life. The insecure hipster boy, the ethereal dancing schoolgirl, the depressive singer who believes in the power of books and faith healing, all appear in Glasgow isolated from anyone but each other. None of their families seem to exist, nor do outside friends, besides Eve’s drug buddy who pops up out of nowhere for a short scene. What little we know of their earlier lives comes from a single conversation.

A ‘will-they-won’t they’ romance develops between James and Eve — A “will-they-won’t they” romance develops between James and Eve

As expected, James falls in love with Eve. He can’t help it, there’s something about her, mysterious and quiet as she is, that plays into his every romantic notion. Though he’s not alone. Everyone she meets seems attracted to Eve and longs to help her put herself back together. She’s irresistible and she knows it, yet we don’t hate her for it.

God Help The Girl is deceptively posed as a band origin story; you know the sort: three lost individuals come together to form a band, have their dreams of fame come true and fall into an ugly break-up and/or drug addiction. The band in God Help the Girl, forms briefly and dissolves amicably (though not without the obligatory scene of hearing their song on the radio), but it turns out, in the end, it was Eve’s story all along.

She gets on a train to go to music school in London and live a new life, with the structure she needs to function as an independent adult and we realize their summer with Eve was just a momentary phase in James and Cassie’s lives. For Eve, this summer was the last bittersweet gasp of life before becoming a real adult, her oft mentioned anxiety and though they will all remember it fondly, they will never be able to recapture it again. She is greatness and for one brief, shining moment they shared her light. There’s no question she will be a pop music legend someday and they will have known her when.

We’re not sure what will happen to the others. Eve is the singer, the songwriter and she creates their world. She allows us to think on the nature of fiction, of the stories we piece together from the raw stuff of our lives. After all the title pleads for help for Eve, she’s the girl we’re meant to focus on.

God Help The Girl is a movie that really seems meant for bored, yet artistic teenagers isolated in the suburbs and sure that no one else shares their tastes. It’s destined to live on as a cult hit, “discovered” again and again by young people–like a relic of some obscure 60s group no one else has ever heard of.

It’s the kind of movie you step out of and think, “So, there are people like me out there!”

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Sex, Silver Service, and Fairy Tales: ‘Sleeping Beauty’

In her debut feature, 2011’s ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy, a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.

In her debut feature, 2011’s Sleeping Beauty, director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy (Emily Browning), a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.

As a character, Lucy is defined by what we as an audience don’t know about her, the blank spaces in her characterization that match those in her working life and it is as if we have slept through parts of the film along with Lucy. Her passivity in life mirrors her sleeping, as she moves around, distant from her surroundings and unattached to anyone. She is also indifferent to her job, in one scene she haphazardly applies lipstick and is told to take the work seriously, as “it is not a game.” Lucy’s narrative arc is her process of waking from the stupor she has existed in.

Lucy is shot several other times in silent, passive positions. There are prolonged sequences of her sleeping, both in her original student apartment and her luxury pad, blinded by her sleep mask, as well as sitting alone while waiting at the bar, and on her way to meet her boss, Clara (Rachael Blake). Much of the film actually happens around Lucy while she waits, listens, and sleeps. Even when she is awake, things are done to her and her body: she sleeps with strangers because of a coin toss, endures a painful bikini wax and a test where she is examined like an animal as part of her job interview, and has lipstick roughly applied to her mouth, meant to match her labia. There is a marked focus on Lucy’s mouth throughout the film, from the opening where a scientist puts a tube down her throat as an experiment to the end where she hides a camera in her mouth and is later awakened by mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Lucy’s only real connection is with her ailing friend Birdmann

However, there are moments of rare activity from Lucy, usually brought about by unfortunate circumstances, where is person beneath her icy shell is revealed. She tends to a sickly friend, Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) and gets into bed with him when he overdoses, though she makes no effort call for help. More crucially, she becomes active when she decides, without an provocation, that she wants to know what happens when she is asleep. Though she this would allow the men to be blackmailed, she purchases and smuggles in a small camera.

Early on, the men who will come to be Lucy’s clients are introduced as a dramatis personae at the silver service dinner which suggests they are members of a secret society. This suggests they are microcosms of different types of clients of sex workers, such as the one who is abusive and takes out his frustrations on her as a woman he is allowed to beat inside of a wife, and the one who falls in love with her and just wants to hold her.

At the silver service dinner, Lucy is set apart for her youth and beauty

Lucy is much younger than the other women in the film and her youth, beauty and pale coloring cause her to be placed on a pedestal. As the silver service dinner, she is covered up with virginal white lingerie while the other women wear black bras with cut outs that reveal their breasts. She is the sole women in white and the main attraction, and even when she makes clumsy mistakes, she is continuously praised.

Because of the value placed in Lucy’s beauty, there is a tension between her and Clara. She scoffs at Clara’s suggestion that her vagina is a temple worthy of respect and ignores her warning that the money earned from her work should be seen only as a temporary windfall not a permanent income she can depend on. These scenes suggest Clara may have been in Lucy’s position one day and aged out of the role. In light at the story’s fairy tale connections, it is interesting that a woman, Clara, is the one who puts her to sleep and looks at her as a commodity.

Lucy is examined by Clara before given the job

In the film’s extended and graphic nude scenes, Lucy’s passive, often sedated body can also be examined by aroused audiences, a notion that suggests audiences use nude star as Lucy’s clients do, as she can never know what they do with her image. Once the nude image is out there, it, like Lucy’s consent to be used by the men while sedated, cannot be controlled and consent cannot be rescinded.

In addition, her motivations for agreeing to this work are left unexamined. Unlike films like Belle De Jour, where a bored woman turns to sex work without seeming financial need, it is never suggested that anything Lucy enters into is her fantasy. Instead, it seems to be something she does without thinking, a path she enters down because she cannot think of anything else to do, and only late into it, when she realizes she is making good money, does she begin to live in the luxury it affords her.

Lucy burns her earnings: is the money unneeded or is she unstable?

However, the constant suggestions of traumas in Lucy’s life: her relationship with Birdmann, mentions of her mother, and of the absence of family or friends, as well as her casual proposal to an acquaintance who alludes to parts of her character he finds flawed, may suggest a conflicted or even ailing mental status. In some scenes, Lucy, as a college student, appears to have great need for money, as she allows herself to be used for science experiments, works in an office doing filing and photocopies and lives in grotty apartment with roommates who are openly apprehensive to her about her failure to pay rent. In one scene where she burns the money she has earned from silver service waitressing, suggesting she either feels no need for the money or has become mired in the surreal sort of magic in the film and barely registers the experience was real. Because she stares at the burning money as if it has cast a spell over her, the second possibility seems most likely.

Lucy consents to be used for science experiments

Sleeping Beauty also raises questions of whether sex work is unfairly stigmatized and separated from other menial work. It is suggested that Lucy, highly confident and assured of her attractiveness as she is, has taken her looks into account and believes sex work would be easier and more lucrative than her other jobs. It is also posed as not dissimilar to consenting to be a guinea pig for science experiments with uncertain results, as she had previously done.

Though she has consented to the sexual nature of her sleep work, Lucy is not even given an opportunity to consent to her involvement in her final client’s suicide, plans which were clearly known to Clara as she appears unsurprised he is dead. In this final scene, Lucy realizes that her actions have weight, even if she doesn’t remember them, as she becomes part of these men’s lives. By signing over her body and memory, she allows them ownership of her and knowledge of her as well as agreeing to trust they will not penetrate her. Many of our most beloved fairy tales romanticize passive, sleeping women, such as the original version of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince rapes the unconscious girl. Though Lucy gives her consent, it is unclear whether person can ever consent to something that would happen while they were unconscious as there is no way she can object if she changes her mind or it crosses the line.

It is questionable whether Lucy can consent to things that would happen while she is not conscious

Depending on one’s interpretation of Lucy’s mental state throughout the film, its ending can be taken one of two ways. Either it suggests, Lucy, a literal Sleeping Beauty is waking up to the reality of her life and can begin to live a “normal life” or she is entering into a mental breakdown she has been staving off with her detachment. In addition, the dead man lying in beside her may remind her of Birdmann, whose death she did not fully grieve over and suggests she has been forcing herself not to become attached to him either. With either interpretation, Lucy regains her autonomy and awareness of reality only after negative events, which casts her sex work and her sexual encounters in a wholly negative light. She awakens into the film’s stark reality, where there are no happily ever afters even when the cinematography is this lovely.

As Lucy awakes, not with a kiss but with a slap to the face, it becomes clear that Leigh’s tale of detachment is no fairy tale.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Girl Power in Sucker Punch, Hanna, and Winter’s Bone

This guest post by Marina DelVecchio also appears at Marinagraphy.

In the past year, directors have been trying to feed our womanist pangs for more girl power in films. At least this is how I see the trend. Because as a woman and a mother, I want to see movies that represent my gender as empowered, important, and intelligent. I want to see them as real and as true and valued members of society. I want to have faith in humanity—in this world, even though it is still centered on patriarchal values and systems that perpetuate the notion that a woman is necessary only in her sexuality—her ability to bring a man to his knees with the want of her. But this is not a real woman. She does exist, but she does not represent women like me—late 30s to early 40s, a mother and educator, struggling to cast out the voices that tell her she is nothing, old, and imperfect if she doesn’t fit the role patriarchy has assigned her. I want to see movies that show me what power feels like—the kind of power that is accessible to me and my daughter—normal women in a normal and imperfect world. The last few months have found me thinking about the female characters depicted in films and how much power they really have. Here they are:

Sucker Punch (directed by Zack Snyder) left me with a knotted feeling in my stomach, as well as with conflicted emotions. I loved the idea of a character escaping her reality of abuse and institutionalization by folding within herself and locating a place of refuge deep in her subconscious. Whatever was happening to her body in real life, her mind was not aware of it because she was in another realm—a more powerful one. I didn’t like that she escaped the reality of a mental institution and an impending lobotomy into a brothel where the girls were being sold off to men. A girl would not escape to this kind of world out of choice, even if she knew she was going to be lobotomized at the end of her journey. And to suggest that sex-trafficking is better than a lobotomy is insane in itself—lobotomize me any day of the week. To have her find refuge into a brothel was definitely an attempt at appeasing the men in the audience of this film. It would not appeal to women. What did appeal to me was that I did not have to watch this beautiful girl gyrate and dance provocatively in order to seduce the highest paying john—who of course, is an old, fat, cigar-smoking and money-padded man with power and political standing.

I loved that she escaped that kind of self-selling image of provocateur to land in a fantasy world wherein she wielded machine guns and knives with natural expertise, power kicks and punches that never missed, and a confidence that all people should have—and all young girls and women should possess. In this fantasy world, she kicked ass, but again, to appeal to the men she had to be called “Baby Doll,” (which brings up the image of a hot red or pure white negligee, depending on the individual man’s fantasy), and she had to look like a little girl in Prep school uniform complete with short skirt and below-the-curve-of-her-busty-bust-shirt. She had to be sweet, sexy, and powerful at the same time—and perhaps because of this—because we cannot seem to have a heroine who is powerful without being sweet (innocent girl) and sexy (slutty siren) at the same time—because we cannot have a heroine who is just powerful, just dominant, and who is not expected to appeal to men’s desires in any way—then Baby Doll (Emily Browning) just doesn’t cut it as a strong female character—and Sucker Punch doesn’t fit the bill of a good, strong, and powerful representation of Girl Power. When the female character has to appeal to men’s sexual yearnings to achieve power, she fails to be powerful.

In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised with Hanna, (directed by Joe Wright), which just came out. 16-years-old, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is raised by her father, an ex-CIA operative who has taught her everything she knows. We first meet her in the wild forests of Finland, very unsexy, un-pretty, and completely covered in layers. And we find her hunting with a bow and arrow, sprinting after her prey, killing it, and then gutting it with her bare hands. So unsexy, and yet so powerful. A small girl, she is smart, fast, and logical.

But there is one problem—she is not normal—she is a genetically engineered girl who was part of a CIA project to build perfect soldiers from birth. And because she is this kind of “soldier,” she is not someone we can relate to in any way. Her skills were not simply developed with the aid of her father; they were made possible because of the genetic modifications that had been made to her while she was still in her mother’s uterus. She was born a soldier, not developed into one, and this reality makes her an unreal hero—at least to me. If she had been a normal little girl, then all the skills she had learned would mean something—maybe that all girls can achieve this kind of mental discipline, this kind of physical prowess—but this message disappears when we learn about her origins. Still, I loved this movie, and as a heroine, Hanna is very powerful compared to Baby Doll. In addition, Cate Blanchett’s character, although the villain in this film, is strong also in her tailored shin length skirts and suits jackets, sporting a short bob haircut, and toting a gun or two or three. The women characters in this movie were quite compelling, including the mother she encounters on her journey, who refuses to wear makeup because she considers it to be dishonest. I’d like to read her story.

Which brings us to Winter’s Bone. I rented this movie one Saturday night, and although it has been criticized for its stark and depressing mood, it is real, gutsy, and a true feminist—womanist—girl power-ish film, lacking in pretensions, sexism, or glamor. 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a real-life girl in the real world, born into the “patriarchal male honor culture of the Missouri Ozarks” (James Bowman, 2010), who feeds her siblings squirrels, and teaches her brother how to hunt, kill, skin, and make a meal of it—all lessons a father would teach to his son. But he’s not around. Part of this culture highlighted by drugs and murder, he is missing; her mother is mentally depressed and useless; and Ree is left to tend to her younger siblings and make sure their house isn’t taken away from them. She is cajoled, lied to, threatened, beaten by men and other women in this clan, and she faces the reality of her real-life responsibilities with quiet fortitude. Accepting the fact that her father is dead, it is left up to this girl to find proof of his death in order to keep her parents’ house from being taken away and leaving her and her mother and siblings homeless. She puts her life in danger to accomplish her goal, and she also gives up her dream of escaping this kind of corrupt life by joining the army and making something better of herself and her future. She is able to save her house and family, through sheer nerve and guts, alone, and for this, she is a true hero—a real life heroine that we can feel confident in advocating as strong.

There is no guile to her—no sex—just smarts and courage—which is more of what I would like to see in movies and their portrayal of women and young girls. Not surprisingly, this is the only movie of the three mentioned directed by a woman, Debra Granik. Although she adapted the film from a novel written by a man, Daniel Woodrell, Granik gave us the kind of heroine that we need; a heroine who fights for decency and justice, and who does not use her sex or appeal to men’s sexual desires to attain that which she is in need of. We need less of Sucker Punch and Mean Girls; less of Charlie’s Angels and Sin City. But we do need more of Ree Dolly’s. So many more. So bring them.

How about you? What film heroine kicks ass for you—preferably a non-sexualized, eroticized, or generated-for-male-consumption heroine?

Marina DelVecchio is a writer and a College Instructor. She has a BA in English Literature, an MS in English and Secondary Education and has completed thirty credits towards a Doctorate in Feminist Theory, Rhetoric and Composititon and 19th century Women Writers. Originally from New York, she began teaching on the High School level and then moved up to the College level in 2005. She presently teaches English Composition, Research, and Literature at a local Community College in North Carolina.