Lynne Ramsay (2017)
Sometime in the early 1970s, a friend’s mother walked out of a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend at the University of York. As she was leaving, a student in the foyer affably asked her, ‘Can’t you take it?’ ‘I can’, she replied, ‘but I don’t see why I should’. Sally says this sums up what she felt departing the Leicester Square Odeon halfway through You Were Never Really Here. (She also asked me to remind her ‘never to go to a film again just because I like the main actor’.) There were several reasons why I saw Lynne Ramsay’s film through, none of them very good. The screening was on the last morning of the London Film Festival, an event that I’d greatly enjoyed in spite of its disappointments: it would have been a dismal anti-climax to end on a walkout. You Were Never Really Here, unlike most of the LFF fare that I saw this year, is short – only eighty-five minutes. There was always the remote possibility that the later stages would change my view of what had gone before. If I sat the film out, I’d be fully justified in inveighing against it.
The protagonist of You Were Never Really Here, adapted by Ramsay from a 2013 novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a psychologically disturbed ‘enforcer’. At the start of the story, based in New York, Joe is living with his elderly, ailing mother (Judith Roberts); the main plot concerns the relationship that unexpectedly develops between him and Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), a teenage girl who first enters his life as a job of work. Nina’s father (Alex Manette), an ambitious politician, employs Joe to find and retrieve his daughter, who has somehow been drawn into a paedophile sex-trafficking ring. The film’s fragmented, disorienting structure and audiovisual scheme serve to express Joe’s disturbed, paranoid mind. Visually and verbally assaultive, the narrative is dominated by killings, grievous bodily harm and self-harm. Lynne Ramsay’s visual virtuosity is unarguable: You Were Never Really Here is a succession of how-did-she-do-that compositions. Letting the camera dwell on an image as if fascinated by it, Ramsay has the gift of making this fascination infectious – regardless of the cause or context of the image. There are rapt contemplations of, inter alia, a sopping wet towel, jelly beans and pooling blood. In other respects, Ramsay doesn’t transcend cliché – the brief flashbacks to childhood abuse and traumatising military service to ‘explain’ Joe, the repeated juxtaposition of scenes of mayhem and a soundtrack of tinny, easy listening music playing on a radio or similar.
As Joe, Joaquin Phoenix is rarely off the screen. The weight he’s put on for recent parts gives him an intimidating bulk. He’s shaggily, uncomfortably convincing as a man out of control (he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for this performance). But the title of the Woody Allen film that Phoenix made between The Master and this one is in danger of becoming his trademark screen persona: I hope he can take a break from irrational man roles in the near future. Lynne Ramsay’s screenplay (which also, and more surprisingly, won at Cannes) requires Phoenix to be almost continuously in extremis. The strongest sequence in You Were Never Really Here – because it’s so distinctive in the context of the film as a whole – shows a group of laughing, carefree young women on a New York street asking Joe to take their photo. His behaviour and demeanour up to this point make you fearful of his response but he takes the phone offered to him and politely obliges; in doing so, he still inadvertently unnerves one of the women. Joe’s situation is more compelling when it intersects with some kind of normality. The lack of such intersection makes the film monotonously grim – a main reason why it doesn’t begin to deserve the comparisons with Taxi Driver that some critics are making.
The climax epitomises the incoherence and aesthetic self-indulgence of You Were Never Really Here. With virtually everyone else in the cast dead, Joe and Nina go to a diner together. The girl asks a question along the lines of where do we go from here. There’s no immediate reply so Nina goes to the bathroom. Alone, Joe shoots himself through the head. A waitress breezes by, oblivious to the fact that the bill she’s left on the table is tipped in the blood that’s spreading across its surface. Nina returns and touches Joe’s head. He wakes up. They get up and leave the diner. The vacated table is spotless. Has Lynne Ramsay provided two alternative endings or did Joe imagine his suicide? I guess the latter, even though the film hasn’t begun to suggest how the mentally fragile Joe and the by now deeply traumatised Nina could possibly ‘move on’ together.
This back-from-the-dead finale echoes an earlier sequence in which Joe attempts to drown himself. For a few moments, he appears to have succeeded but then ‘sees’ Nina struggling underwater to swim upwards to the surface. Joe is impelled to save his own life in order to save the girl’s. The clearest message of the diner sequence(s) is that Lynne Ramsay wants it both ways. She can have the waitress inanely say ‘Have a nice day’ to a man she doesn’t notice is a corpse – that got a knowing laugh around the Leicester Square Odeon – and end with a vaguely hopeful indication that loving feelings between people are salvific. Lynne Ramsay was likeably honest on stage before the screening. Declining even a mini-Q&A with the LFF person introducing her, she asked to be judged by what she put on the screen. I’ve done as Ramsay asked. She also warned us that, after the film was over, ‘You’ll feel you need a walk’. I gather from Sally she wasn’t the only person to bring the walk forward. There were no breezy questions in the foyer this time, just another woman rolling her eyes and heading for the exit.
15 October 2017
