Trauma, according to te renowned psychiatrist Bessel von Der Kolk, can be defined as an experience that radically upsets your world view. After a war, divorce, or rape, to take some examples, ‘reality’ is no longer the same. Post-traumatic-stress-disorder symptoms can result: extreme emotions, alienation, numbness or hyperarousal, an inability to perceive the future.
Taking that definition, we can ascertain that many of the stories we see on screen are spurred by trauma. Whether an independent art film like the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man or a blockbuster, the story typically begins with a curve-ball that throws the protagonist (and “reality”) off-kilter.
To be taken for a traumatic ride in cinema is quotidian.
What is relatively new in cinema is to experience trauma from a woman’s perspective. Women are terrifically under-represented in the film industry. In Western countries with developed film industries, like the US and France, less than 20% of directors are female. In Europe, only 16% of grants are allocated to projects by women directors.
A film directed by a woman is rare.
Even at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the representation of women was laughable. Not only were there only three women directors in competition, a number of films, such as Francois Ozon’s Amant Double and Michel Hazanavicius Redoubtable showed women as bland, subservient and appendages to the men around them: with no personality or stories of their own.
What difference does it make when it comes to the stories of trauma being told? Does a woman have another angle?
It is hence with great curiosity that I went to see Lynn Ramsay’s new film You Were Never Really There, one of the three films by women in the Cannes competition. Ramsay has been one of my favorite directors ever since I discovered her film Morvern Callar (2002). Each of her engrossing films, from Ratcatcher (1999) to We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), is centered on a life-changing trauma with a radically different eye than what one normally observes in male-directed films.
Morvern Callar is the riveting story of a girl faced with the trauma of her boyfriend’s suicide. The film begins with her stepping over his dead bloody body in the living room to sit on the couch and listen to music on her IPod. Morvern (played by Samantha Morton) barely speaks. She functions in zombie mode: her face is shut down; she does not even tell anyone that her boyfriend is dead. She simply makes pizza in the kitchen.
She only begins to recover when she chain-saws her boyfriend’s body to pieces—and appropriates his novel as her own.
Ramsay’s more recent film We Need to Talk About Kevin also begins with blood and trauma: the protagonist’s dream flashback to a blood-tomato orgy in Spain, followed, throughout the film, by flashbacks to the murders her teenaged son committed in a high school with a bow and arrow.
In both movies, the protagonists have every symptom of PTSD: from numbness to alienation to an inability to connect with society. Their reality has been shattered. And yet both have a curious development: Morvern goes from being a proletariat supermarket clerk to becoming a successful pseudo-novelist vacationing in Spain. In a peak scene, she is carried along by a religious bull procession in a Spanish village, and seems joyously transformed. The trauma of her boyfriend’s death actually leads to fulfillment.
As for the mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin: it is never clear whether her trauma was the serial killings of her spooky son—or simply unwanted motherhood. By the end of the movie—as in Morvern Callar—she seems to have healed both. The film is the healing journey of a broken self, through a feminist lens.
What would Ramsay do in her new film, which, according to the press kit, had trauma in spades?
I got a sneak preview from the producer, whom I met chatting with my friend, director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire on the beachfront.
“It was I who pitched the story to Lynn,” the producer said with excitement, “It’s a short story I read by Jonathan Ames that is all about trauma. So much trauma! It was right up her alley. Although the result is currently a little uneven, the editing is not quite finished.”
The plot : a traumatized American war vet, now hitman, is desperate to rescue a teenaged girl from a juvenile sex ring, and goes on a killing spree to do so. Indeed, while in Ramsay’s previous work, there seemed to be just “one trauma” affecting the protagonist, here the traumas are multiplied, rather like swinging down the handle in a casino and hitting the jackpot, with an avalanche of coins ensuing. The character of the hitman, played magnificently by Joachim Phoenix, seems inwardly destroyed by (the many!) traumas of his past: a past which includes watching his father abuse his mother, the brutality of war, and seeing cadavers as an FBI agent. His mind flashes continually from one memory to another, with a hallucinatory effect on the audience. The only bond he seems to have in his life is his strong connection with his mother, and a young girl he wishes to save from a prostitution ring.
There is yet another trauma in this trauma-ridden film: that of sexual exploitation. That of the young girl the hitman wants to save. Her face is as numb as his.
Perhaps the two recognize each other. In a very touching move, Joe the hitman tells her, when he finds her in a whorehouse, “it will be okay.”
What makes this story of intersecting traumas intriguing is the gunfire way in which it is told. The film is a kaleidoscope of fractured parts: memories and present, a replication of he mental processing of someone suffering PTSD. We struggle to figure out what is actually going on: piecing together reality at the same time as our anti-hero. The result admittedly often does not quite work: some of the plot elements seem crammed hastily together, the character of the girl is undeveloped and the ending derails into a mad rush for story completion). However many scenes—like the man sinking into the river with his beloved mother’s corpse, her hair rising like Ophelia—are poetically powerful.
Indeed Ramsay’s fractured depiction of trauma is in itself a radical move, an antidote to the simplistic commonplace that “one” Ur-trauma in the past determines our identity. Here trauma is everywhere you look: in your family, in society, in the work force. The brain reels from one trauma, just to experience another.
“I think we live in a traumatized world!” the sensitive red-haired Scottish director said to me, flustered, with a lively wave of her hands.
It is a political comment. For at its core, Ramsay’s vision of trauma is more than a psychological exploration. It is, in subtle form, a critique of the forms of patriarchal power inherent to the Western world: imperialism (the war flashbacks appears to be in Vietnam), political corruption (the daughter’s father is a corrupt governor), and police power (the FBI). Hers is a world of male domination where the women appear only as victims. Tellingly, while our poor disturbed American hero has exercised roles of power throughout his life (as soldier, FBI agent and hitman), wielding violence at will, the only two women in the film have no power at all. They are cloistered in rooms waiting to be saved: pawns in the male game, subject to the whims of father, husband, savior.
And yet it is the weakest female—the teenage girl delivered by her own father into a prostitution ring—who, in a surprise move, brings the story to resolution: by adopting, literally, the male weapon. While the hitman tries to save the prostitute girl with violence (in a rehash of Taxi Driver), it is the girl who accomplishes the final act of violence. It is she who brings her savior salvation. In the concluding scene, the two of them—hitman and girl, numbed, shell-shocked—sit in a diner, and wonder where to go.
The girl places her hand on the traumatized man’s hand (who is having hallucinations of bloody violence) and calmly says:
“It will be alright. It’s a beautiful day!”
This ending rings a bell. In We Need to Speak About Kevin, the ending shot is the mother accepting her murderer son, with a white light shining on both. In Morvern Callar, the last shot is Morvern standing alone on a train quay, absolutely alienated from her world, and yet determined to embrace the future and take the next train.
Just like in these two previous films, “You Were Never Really Here” ultimately valorizes the strength to face despair and move on.
Could this be the female angle to trauma?
Lynn Ramsay’s film—despite or because of its fractured uneven narrative—received a clamorous applause at Cannes, and was a co-winner of the Best Screenplay award.