Saturday Night at the Movies
The twee of life
by Dennis Hartley
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| I love Scottish pop: God Help the Girl |
As far as plotless yet pleasingly pastoral Scottish musicals centering on mentally unstable young female protagonists yearning to become pop stars go, I suppose you could do worse than God Help the Girl. Sort of an oddball cross between Alan Moyle’s manic-depressive 1980 music biz drama Times Square and Gillian Armstrong’s kooky, sunny-side-up 1982 new wave musical, Starstruck, the film (written, directed and scored by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch) stars Emily Browning as Eve, a clinically depressed young Glaswegian with musical inclinations…and the soul of a poet. Oh, and a cool beret.
When we first meet her, Eve is in hospital for psychiatric counseling and treatment for an eating disorder. She has a habit of sneaking out to hit the live music clubs when no one is looking. During one of these excursions, Eve Meets Cute with a bespectacled, nebbish-y singer-guitarist named James (Olly Alexander), but not before witnessing the onstage dissolution of his band (an argument over volume levels results in show-stopping fisticuffs with his drummer during their opening number). James quickly intuits that Eve has a decent voice, a unique charisma and a natural gift for songwriting. He introduces Eve to his friend Cassie (Hannah Murray), an aspiring singer. Guess what happens next…
There’s not much of a “story” to speak of, but Murdoch does sustain a kind of baroque mood throughout; an impressionistic rendering of a bittersweet, youthful summer idyll informed by Browning and Murray’s dreamy, airy, vocal performances and Murdoch’s lovely chamber pop-influenced melodies (and he’s not afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve…in one of the music sequences, he has Browning hold up a 45 RPM copy of “Pretty Ballerina” by the Left Banke). I found the baroque vibe pleasantly invocative of Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street (yes, I’m one of those contrarians who actually dug Sir Paul’s dreaded “vanity film”). While the jury is still out on whether this is a rock’n’roll fable aspiring to be a musical, or a musical aspiring to be a rock’n’roll fable, if you accept it as a collection of endearing music videos interstitially linked by a (very) loosely constructed narrative, you just might get away with calling it entertaining.
(In limited release and on PPV)
Previous posts with related themes:
We Are the Best
Top 10 Rock Musicals
Saturday Night at the Movies review archives
P.S. No, seriously. I really do love Scottish pop: