Lynne Ramsay has been a director I’ve studied for many years – and I cannot wait to see what she does next. “You Were Never Really Here” which was released in 2018, is on Amazon Prime is one of the most underrated films of the past few years. Warning, her films are arresting, but her uncompromising vision is something to behold, study and admire. Since 1999, she’s done only four films – I rank her as one of my favorite directors. “You’ve got to stick up for what you believe in. If you don’t do that, you’re doing a disservice to the audience, because you’re making something really diluted,” she told the press. Ramsay makes you work in her movies. You have to interpret, decipher – read her composition – why are characters placed where they are? Why are they framed in that particular way?
With a different director, “You Were Never Really Here” could have been an exploitative vigilante movie – where the body count is high and violence is celebrated – emphasizing the action. In Ramsay’s hands we don’t focus on the action – but we literally are navigating the mind of our main character. Similarly to the way Marty Scorsese took us inside the psyche of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” (which this movie shares some of its DNA,) Ramsay deconstructs and makes us experience the splintered and damaged mind of Joe – played by a spellbindingly good Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix worked on this role before his performance in JOKER – and it’s worth analyzing and admiring both performances. I digress…
Joe has experienced things we will never forget – and the memories haunt him. His mother and him were victims of an abusive father. He later became a Marine and an FBI agent and those experiences further have left irreparable indentations. Now, he devotes himself to rescuing young girls who have been kidnapped into the sex trade while taking care of his frail mom. Things begin to spiral out of control when he’s hired to save the daughter of a New York Senator.
The film is a swift 90 minutes. Lynne Ramsay achieves more in this time frame than other directors do in lengthy films. Notice the way Joe is introduced to you – faceless. Notice the way he’s always framed – by hallways – windows – door frames – explaining his mental state. In particular, watch when he first is face to face with his mom at home. Soon enough you will get visual glimpses to his past – burst of memories – nightmares. Kaleidoscopally, you’re given information. As I have alluded to before, the film is violent – not for what you see – but what you don’t see. There’s a brilliantly edited sequence when Joe goes to rescue Nina at the brothel where you see the aftermath of what’s happening on security cameras. There’s also another spectacular moment where Joe lays on the kitchen floor next to someone he’s shot and they ironically and movingly sing “I’ve Never Been To Me.” The film is brutal and redemptive at the same time. In a gorgeous metaphorical sequence – where Joe bids farewell to his mom – he’s resigned that his life is meaningless and he’s unable to continue – to all of a sudden – be reminded that we all have a purpose. It’s a gorgeous life affirming moment – surrounded by all the darkness.
Lynne Ramsay is brilliant.
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Amazon Prime. Available to rent on Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
Screenplay by Lynne Ramsay
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman, and Judith Roberts
89 minutes
About Writer and Director Lynne Ramsay
Lynne Ramsay is a Scottish film director, writer, producer, and cinematographer. In an interview with BAFTA, Lynne Ramsay discusses her journey to becoming a film director. “I fell into it inadvertently through being a stills photographer. Being a film director wasn’t a career option where I came from, a typical working-class Glaswegian family. My parents were film buffs, so from an early age, I was exposed to their passion for old Hollywood classics. I was brought up watching Mildred Pierce (1945), Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock. We would talk about the plot while we watched them. I discovered photography because I was at this little place in Glasgow, I think it was the Visual Arts Centre, and there was a huge darkroom that no-one was using. I didn’t know anything about photography, but I thought it was amazing, the smell of the chemicals and everything. I was self-taught. I thought it was like magic, an alchemy, things appearing before you in the developer. I became quite obsessed with it. A great photography teacher showed our class Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren, with and without the soundtrack. I was mesmerised by it. I applied to film school on a whim the day before the deadline expired. So, I went to film school not knowing anything about film, having never made one. It was Walter Lassally, a great DP, he really liked me – I think he thought he could see an eye there… I hadn’t done a foundation year or anything. Most people there had made films before, I think I was probably alone in never having made one. So, I was discovering what films were and learning how to move the camera and everything. It was a different language, but I learned pretty fast. (BAFTA.org) A few of her films include Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk about Kevin and You Were Never Really Here.
Bringing the Script to Screen
“The film, which won Best Actor and Best Screenplay at Cannes, began in relative tranquility. The Glasgow-born Ramsay, fresh off the success of her 2011 Tilda Swinton drama, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was presented with a Jonathan Ames novella…The rights hadn’t yet been secured, but Ramsay decided to write a screenplay anyway, retiring to a small, secluded Greek island to work. “It started off a little bit like, ‘I’ve never done anything like this before, so let’s see how it goes,’” she recalls. “But, yeah, it was terrifying, because I could have been screwed [if the rights fell through].” Still, excited to draw on her love of noir, Ramsay kept writing – and she knew who should play the sullen but soulful antihero. She had long been a fan of Phoenix’s work; he, in turn, was equally excited about working with her on something. It was just a matter of whether the timing would work out, since he had several films on his plate… As Phoenix remembers, in the spring of 2016, “I was like, ‘Can you shoot this in eight weeks?’” – an insanely quick timetable considering the director hadn’t even started location scouting yet. “And she said, ‘Yep.’ I was like, ‘How the fuck could she say yes?’ I was certain she was going to say no, and I could be, ‘Oh, well, at least I tried.’” (Rolling Stone)
The Making of You Were Never Really Here
“The shortened preproduction window was unusual for Ramsay, who first gained international acclaim with her gritty coming-of-age drama Ratcatcher (1999) and her woozy, expressionistic character study Morvern Callar (2002). Then came Kevin, and after riding high on the film’s reception, she was slated to direct her most ambitious work: the revisionist Western Jane Got a Gun, starring Natalie Portman. Creative differences prompted her to walk away right before production, and while Ramsay says she didn’t immediately return to You Were Never Really Here after that project fizzled, she acknowledges that the time spent on the Western may have helped get her ready for her action-packed vigilante thriller. “When you prep something, there’s a lot of experience you get from that,” she says. “I’d never shot an action sequence – [but] I prepped some.” Noting that she knows filmmakers who have prepared to shoot a project only for it to fall apart, Ramsay finally says, “The bad things teach you more – I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true.” What really bonded the director and actor, however, was hashing out what they wouldn’t allow in the film. “It was a brutal rehearsal period,” says Phoenix. “[We had] this really strong script and this great foundation and this clear trajectory and a really well-written character – and there was something in that, I think, that instinctually repelled us.” “Every time we went through the script, all those things that worked made us uneasy,” Phoenix adds. “And we were like, ‘How can we make this not work? How can we create a scenario that makes us find other things that we hadn’t anticipated?’ That became what was so exciting: ‘Who knows if this is going to be any good?’ “It was a constant willingness to fail,” he continues. “We would say, ‘Well, we know that we can’t do that – we can’t do these things that we’ve seen before that feel familiar to us. OK, that takes that off the table. . . .’” The freedom to dream up a new kind of vigilante movie – abandoning dozens of script pages along the way – energized them to the point that they felt a letdown when production ended. “When we got to the end of the shoot, I was sad,” Ramsay says. “I was like, ‘Let’s make another movie!’” (Rolling Stone)