Stuart Murdoch’s Musical Film God Help The Girl played this past weekend at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, just after its stateside debut.
Technically God Help The Girl is not a Belle & Sebastian movie. But because of its complicated history/ambiguous definition and the fact that the movie plays out like so many Belle & Sebastian songs, can we just please be real and for this article admit that that’s exactly what it is?
Some context: God Help The Girl is a side project of B&S frontman Stuart Murdoch who released their (only?) self-titled album in 2009. Now, since he writes most of B&S’s material and the they backed up the songs (and the cover is the same black & one color photograph motif as all previous albums) it’s hard to really define how this was not another Belle & Sebastian album. The only thing I can think of is that though Murdoch wrote the songs, he sings on one and the rest are various female vocalists (and Neil f’ing Hannon).
This project was intended to be a film from the outset, but the vocalists featured on the album were not the actors/singers that ended up being in God Help The Girl the movie, ten years in the making, filmed in 2012, and released this year.
There is a film soundtrack album which features these same songs and others recorded with the actual cast and some Proper B&S songs that were featured in the movie. It gets really convoluted when you look at a song like Act of the Apostle, which was recorded in 2006 by B&S (as “Act Of The Apostle” Part 2), then covered by Catherine Ireton for the God Help The Girl LP, then recorded again for the movie and soundtrack by Emily Browning.
Okay, context over. The Movie:
At heart, the film portrays all of the things you should expect from a song by the band: misunderstood, awkward, smart kids who are more interested in “reading, being by myself” (main character Eve’s first two examples of what made her happy) than gaining the approval of the soccer football hooligans hanging around Glasgow, illnesses, and ambiguous religious overtones.
There is so much Goddamn quirk in this movie. It’s ridiculous. It opens with a literal interpretation of “Act Of The Apostle” sung winkingly by the main character in a music video as she finds her way out of her hospital room and into a club where she meets a boy who starts to play his thoughtful acoustic guitar songs until the drummer comes in too heavy.
These tropes, I should point out, are so well worn into the fabric of indie/hipster movies (Wes Anderson movies, Juno, The Perks of Being A Wallflower) and music (every band that B&S has inspired in their 20 years and those that came before them) that in 2014 it’s hard to imagine it being played almost-straight. That said, there’s no one I’d trust more than Murdoch to do it.
It plays out so incredibly idealized that it forces the grain of salt down your throat. Everything is taken to its logical rosy-colored extreme, from finding session musicians (a reenactment of the running-from-the-mob scene of A Hard Day’s Night, as talented musicians who apparently have nothing else going on set off after the band shows up in a park with some fliers), playing their first show (in an auditorium, for some reason, to about 200 kids who are totally into it), to the weather in Glasgow (sunny all Summer).
In the end it plays, much like the above movies, to the fantasies of every sensitive-type who was more into overanalyzing obscure music than sports in high secondary school. The idea that even though no one thinks I’m that special, my best friend and love interest and everyone we encounter will make me their top priority and let their lives satellite mine as I wander uncertainly toward unanimous appreciation. That my quirky songs are better than those of anyone who would go to school for it or the thousands of other bands in the city and all they need is to find their outlet. Someone I knew in a previous life once said “my friends and I used to just sit around listening to Belle & Sebastian and think how much smarter we were than everybody.” That sums it up, and I’d point out that she still loved the band to death.
So as I say all this, I should point out that I watched with a stupid grin on my face the whole time, because underneath all the cynicism that I’ve found is sort of a prerequisite to living in a 21st century city, there is still that small overly optimistic part of me that identifies completely, the part that is looking forward to Belle & Sebastian’s next album (January 2015) and that, despite itself, finds comfort in all their music and in this movie.
The soundtrack is great. You know exactly what you’re getting, as the band hasn’t evolved a huge amount in their time in existence. Their bread and butter is safe and reliable, new songs written in a familiar way. I’d say in terms of quality, this falls somewhere between The Life Pursuit and 2010’s disappointing but still good Write About Love. There are some serious hooks (“I’ll Have to Dance with Cassie” and “Perfection as a Hipster” each have dangerously catchy choruses). The narrative doesn’t follow all of these songs along literally. Some are metaphorical musical numbers with a few of the lyrics acted out, some are diegetic and just being played on the radio in the background, and others very much are literally what is happening.
To its credit, the movie does a good job of becoming…well maybe self-aware isn’t the right phrase. Maybe self-prophesying? There is a recognition toward the end, that the characters in the movie, and likewise those in your average Belle & Sebastian song, can’t live this life forever, having quirky dead-end jobs, staying up late to listen to obscure tape cassettes, falling in love with your best friend, kayaking through undiscovered river channels. It turns all of the cheesiness to a stark reminder that this is just a romanticized nostalgia for a bygone point in Stuart Murdoch’s life, which he’s admitted to, of when the band was first starting and everything was new.
The cast does a great job of acting out everything I’ve been describing (and it includes Gilly from Game of Thrones). Some scenes go too quickly or aren’t there or are incohesive, but I think that’s the logical problem when you transfer from three minute pop songs to a movie that comes in just under two hours, and the cast carries them at a decent pace.
I can think of quite a few days in my life that, though they were regular days and there were probably a million things going wrong, I’ve raised up to some unrealistic standard in my memory. To the point that they seem on par with this movie. I think as long as you’ve got those days of your own, and you recognize them for what they really are, and that it’s exactly what this movie is, you’ll get the same giddy charm from Eve as you got from Sukie in her graveyard, Judy and her Dream of Horses, Lazy Line Painter Jane, and Photo Jenny before her.
Information on how to watch God Help The Girl is available at http://us.godhelpthegirl.com/