Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as “a slightly more philosophical primer” for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, “community-based” films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech.
In Joy, a female police officer faces the camera and explains that we’re watching a staged re-enactment of the disappearance of an 18 year old girl that will appear on local television, in the hopes of jogging the memory of anyone who might have seen a clue. As we watch Joy’s stand-in Helen (Annie Townsend) retrace steps through a park before disappearing into the woods, the cop’s voice-over explains how she calms the parents of a missing teenager by encouraging them to look at best case scenarios. Joy, she says, “might have been one of those young people who wanted to get lost.”
The feature focuses on how and why Helen came to “play” Joy, and how the other girl’s absence left a gap amongst her friends and family waiting to be filled. Joy––who we never see, but are told Helen bears a striking physical resemblance to––came from a loving, upper middle-class home, played in a band and dated an attractive yuppie real estate agent. Helen has been living in the custody of the state since she was a child, spends her after school hours working as a maid in a hotel, and has never had close friends, let alone a boyfriend. Though their film is comprised mainly of long, contemplative shots of Helen transversing the landscapes of the city, her school, and the woods where Joy disappeared/the reenactment takes place, much of it set to the sound of Helen’s internal dialog with Joy, Molloy and Lawlor use these languid poetics to the service of a story about class passing. Helen clearly wants to emulate, if not out-and-out replace Joy in the lives of Joy’s parents and boyfriend, to suck up both the privilege and love that the lost girl left behind.
But it’s not as Vertigo-esque as it might seem; as conveyed by her imagined messages to Joy, Helen is not a cynical opportunist, but a pragmatic (if semi-delusional) optimist. She convinces herself that the police officer is on to something, that Joy got lost on her own. She does move in on the other girl’s absence as the opportunity she’s been waiting for to correct her dreary lot, but does it as if pretending that she and Joy had a silent pact to help one another remake their lives.
Helen is lovely to look at and ultimately compelling, but it does test patience, not least with its radically uneven performances. Though their casting process is usually fairly arbitrary (Molloy said before this morning’s screening that as a matter of course, “whoever turns up that day gets to be in the film”), for the first time Lawlor and Malloy held actual auditions to find a young woman to play the title role in Helen. Though Annie Townsend is no more a professional actress than any of Lawlor and Molloy’s collaborators (she’s actually a player on Newcastle United’s ladies football team), it’s her remarkably naturalistic, bizarrely seductive performance that breaks through the static of Helen’s sorely untrained cast, sleepy pacing and mildly too-futuristic premise, to really make the film something special.
A question/quibble: Lawlor noted before the screening that the decision to screen Joy and Helen together was made by the festival, and that the filmmakers had not necessarily intended for the works to be seen consecutively. Maybe two of Joy’s nine minutes are incorporated directly into Helen; one assumes that the rest stands alone because the filmmakers didn’t want the feature to depict the re-enactment literally, and the film is probably more haunting for it. But as long as that literal re-enactment exists, would it really be preferable to see the two films playing at the same festival apart?
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