Programme Notes: Lynne Ramsay

There is a moment in Ratcatcher (1999), Lynne Ramsay’s dreamy debut feature film, where the protagonist, James, takes the bus to the end of the line and discovers a housing estate under construction. He finds himself in a half-formed kitchen in front of a large window which opens onto an expansive golden cornfield. James comes out from the dark and jumps onto the windowsill, and an idea of longing and of hope is finally made physical in the film. He has come that day from the dark, stuffy, litter-lined streets of Govan where his family wait restlessly to find out if they’ll be given a council house on the outskirts of the city. And here he is now, balancing on the window frame, an empty, open expanse in front of him. Waiting for him. He sits for a moment, and we wait. Then he takes off to the other side, through the open window and running into the field. The camera goes with him. 

With the release of Ratcatcher 25 years ago, Glasgow-born Lynne Ramsay announced herself as a director with an indisputably poetic visual language, far from the gritty social realism of the male-dominated Scottish cinema of the time. A slate of critically successful short films behind her, with Ratcatcher Ramsay develops her ideas and establishes her aesthetic: grim reality captured by striking, poetic expression. There is not so much in the way of exposition or even dialogue in her film, Ramsay lets the imagery, the concise framing of a shot and the sounds that bleed into the frame, do much of the storytelling. These are quiet, singular moments that are at once both passing and defining experiences for her characters, and ways of storytelling that have established Ramsay as an auteur since her debut feature. 

That scene with James on the windowsill represents, for me, the most prominent themes that Ramsay explores in her work. Each of her central characters rattle around the screen in various states of impenetrable loneliness, heightened by moments of violence or death. In Ramsay’s second feature, Morvern Callar (2002), Morvern glides between her job at a supermarket and nights out at drug-fuelled parties, while her boyfriend’s body lies on her living room floor, after she discovers that he has killed himself on Christmas Eve. In We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Eva returns to America from years of travelling abroad, and struggles to settle into the conventions of motherhood, wrestling with the confusion of raising a son that she is not sure she quite loves. For Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe in You Were Never Really Here (2018), a childhood of abuse has created this broken hitman-for-hire, who listlessly wanders around New York City, waiting for his next job to come in. Ramsay’s characters are all deeply lonely humans, infected by an existential impermanence that they’re not quite sure how to escape from. Like James, they are all caught on the windowsill, teetering between moments of darkness that threaten to define them and a desire to escape.

 Ramsay’s use of sound in her films further compounds this sense of suffocating isolation. She uses score sparingly and herself admits that she ‘cuts to sound’, creating moments of tension and relief with sharp cuts to Morvern’s heels clattering down the stairs, or James’s incessant scratching at the toes of his new shoes. Her characters say very little and yet her soundscapes are full of their interior lives. It’s almost overwhelming at times; the relentless sound of the sprinklers in Eva’s garden, the constant clicking on and off of Morvern’s Christmas tree lights, the cacophony of voices and trains and screaming on the Brooklyn streets that Joe tries to lose himself in. We want to scream with them, we want to get away. Music acts as that escape for many of Ramsay’s characters, most notably for Morvern, whose Walkman is glued to her hip in nearly every scene, even whilst she’s dancing under the flashing lights in a club in Spain. Songs on her endless playlists, like ‘Some Velvet Morning’, are just gestures of a definition of her detached existence. ‘How she gave me life/how she made it end’ reverberates in her ears as she floats through the supermarket. 

These are hard, gritty films. The violence that pervades each is palpable, especially in We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. Despite so much of it taking place off screen, there is pain and hurt lingering in every scene. The wailing of baby Kevin, the mute screams of the tourists in New York, the thick, viscous red of the tomatoes at the beginning of …Kevin. It all hurts to look at, to listen to, not just for the characters but the audience too. These are not happy films. These are not happy characters. And yet, there is something so starkly, nakedly beautiful and self-assured in Lynne Ramsay’s imagery, in her use of sound and music, that insists that we cannot look away. Not out of fear, but because the picture she paints is so entrancing that it’s impossible to tear our eyes away. It’s in that where there is an escape. Perhaps muddied by years of trauma like it is for Joe, or ironically positioned in the holiday adverts that are stapled to the walls of the office Eva works in, but that way out is there for them. The golden field on the other side of the window flickers in the corners of their eyes, an escape from the regularity of their mundane existence if they’ll only just turn around and jump through it.