Robert Switzer

Lynne Ramsay has identified something essential about working-class life, and has been able to articulate it in these two wonderful, but bleak films set in Scotland.

In both films, horrific things can happen suddenly, for no reason at all. In the opening sequence of Ratcatcher, the little boy who is wool-gathering and twisting himself up in gauze curtains by the window is stunned back to reality by a slap to the head from his mother, who is out-of-frame.

Once each of these films started, I couldn’t tear my eyes away, or my ears either.

Ratcatcher, which is set in the late 1970’s during the garbage strike that led to the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the transformation of the country, for better or for worse, features songs by Eddie Cochran, Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, The Chordettes, Carl Orff, and is anchored at multiple points with sections of Nick Drake’s incomparable ‘Cello Song’, from ‘Five Leaves Left’

As the other film opens, it’s namesake and primary character Movern Callar snuggles up to what turns out to be a corpse, and we don’t know it’s a corpse at first, until we see the self-inflicted wounds on the wrists and neck. But we know it’s Christmas, because we see the tree with the winking lights, and the gifts nearby.

The typical gush of emotion and obligatory bad weather funeral scenes that would be forthcoming in any other film never happen here. Instead Morvern is in something that looks like denial, but is actually an instant and pragmatic acceptance of the situation as just one more shitty thing that happened, for no reason at all.

After she reads the suicide note left by the boyfriend, we find out that he’s written a novel, probably while Morvern has been off paying the bills working her gig at the supermarket, and that he wanted her to submit the novel for publication, and use the remaining bank balance for his funeral. He generously tells Morvern that she can keep all the music.

Instead, Movern decides to go off on an extended pub/party crawl with a good friend, claim the novel as her own, and give her selfish and self-absorbed boyfriend the very unique funeral he actually deserves, while wearing a walkman playing his mixtape duct-taped to her naked leg.

After a weekend of wicked partying, Movern glides into work at the supermarket to Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s ‘One Velvet Morning’, one of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard; an attempt at psychedelia that went horribly wrong somewhere, in a mesmerizingly terrifying way. Can, Ween, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Holgar Czukay, John Cale, Sterolab, and Lee Perry round out the soundtrack, which is superb overall.

In Ratcatcher, it’s all about one family’s quest to get a better council flat, set in the ebb and flow of the banal and the terrible. All Morvern Callar wants is to step outside of the deadly and soul-crushing routine of her tiny, and miserable life.

The characters in both films succeed somewhat in getting what they’re after. But the most impressing thing about the characters in both of these films is how little real impact the awful events that come their way seem to make on them. It’s as if the character’s emotions have been cauterized, tied-off, stunted; amputated or shrunk somehow, along with their aspirations.

The films are hauntingly beautiful visually, despite the stark settings of the action. The actors and actresses have the look of the hardscrabble Scotch-Irish I grew up around, and who still surround me today. The rolling scenery and rotted post-industrial landscape look quite a bit like home, too.

The performances given are nearly flawless technically, and transparent dramatically.

My only complaint is that, while the Criterion edition of Ratcatcher had subtitles so the dialog remained available, even when the thick Scottish accents were undecipherable, the characters in Morvern Callar had equally thick accents, but no subtiltes were available in the DVD edition of this film.

Both of these films are highly recommended. Ratcatcher was released in 1999, Morvern Callar in 2002. If you haven’t had an opportunity to see them, I’d take the time. Netflix has both, and both are worth the effort.