Watched: God Help The Girl (2014).
This musical film was written and directed by Stuart Murdoch of the indie pop group Belle and Sebastian, and it lives and dies depending on whether or not you like the songs (which, unsurprisingly, reflect the musical style of the band). The spoken segments, which thankfully aren’t huge, are the kind of garbage you’d expect the white kid with dreadlocks in your philosophy class to spout, but the songs retain a nice sort of innocence that really decides the tone of the film.
There is a threadbare sort-of story here: girl has anorexia, girl leaves hospital prematurely and moves in with platonic guy friend, girl forms band with guy friend and another girl, girl dates cool frontman, girl leads on platonic guy friend, guy friend gets jealous, girl decides to leave for London, girl has last-minute heart-to-heart with guy friend, all interspersed with lots of music. It’s all a bit twee, but it keeps the film bobbing along.
If I had one chief problem with this film, it’s that Emily Browning’s character (who is, honest to god, called “Eve”) is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl - the camera endlessly ogles her, and while I expect the filmmaker’s defence is that she’s the arguable protagonist, you get the sense that she’s still being viewed through the lens of the male deuteragonist, played by Olly Alexander, who is utterly smitten with her. The anorexia, which has the potential to be handled well, almost begins to feel like the token flaw - she does grow as a person, and it’s far from a perfect example of the trope, but it is there to a limited extent. The whole film starts to feel like one big song by a guy about a girl’s internal monologue, and it can get off-putting.
But it’s still sweet. Mostly.