One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002).
Flowers are for life and for death; in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), the titular protagonist roams a mausoleum in her new floral party dress, flanked on either side by memorial bouquets. Behind her trail two bewildered literati, who have just offered her £100,000 for the novel they think she wrote. The manuscript’s real author, Morvern’s boyfriend, has been in the ground for a time. After he killed himself, Morvern dismembered and buried his body, emptied his bank account, and went on holiday to Spain. When the publishers ask Morvern what her next project might be, she answers, “I work in a supermarket.”
Across her filmography, Ramsay’s main characters are common people who find themselves disoriented and blinking through encounters with death and darkness. Their actual circumstances are ordinary, sordid, tragic, predictable: a child accidentally drowning his friend in a Glasgow slum (Ratcatcher, 1999), a well-to-do suburban mother fretting over her weird son (We Need To Talk About Kevin, 2011), a veteran with PTSD enacting violent fantasies of heroism (You Were Never Really Here, 2017). But each character’s experience takes on a peculiar, sparkling gravity amidst the muck. Morvern’s head rises above the cemetery’s shadow as if above water; days earlier, she experimented with dying by submerging herself in the bathtub. As she grapples with a violent loss, she finds isolated moments of vivid wonder: a worm in wet earth, Can’s “Spoon,” her own red fingernails.
The idea of drowning permeates Ramsay’s films, each in their way shifting between above and below, life and death—their sound design, tellingly, often approximates the specific aural remove of being underwater. Ratcatcher begins and ends with drownings in the same crummy canal, but both James’s squalor and newfound awareness of death are countered by his enlivening discovery of a golden field. When Eva Khatchadourian plunges her head underwater in We Need To Talk About Kevin, she reemerges as her son. In You Were Never Really Here, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is constantly gasping for air, whether having a panic attack, taking his head back out of a plastic bag, or finally resurfacing from the pond where he lays his mother to rest. The struggle to keep breathing can be otherworldly, bewildering, and sometimes raucous. As the line between above and below becomes fuzzy, we loosen our grip on tightly held moral assumptions. Ramsay’s filmmaking is animated by a deep curiosity about how moving through grief can intensify the immediate texture of living, creating extraordinary moments of concentrated perception. Each of her characters do as Morvern does: walk apart, injured and wide-eyed, toward life and death at the same time.