Details Are Acoustical - Lynne Ramsay

Afterimage, July, 2001 by Catherine Cullen

The Films of Lynne Ramsay

Absorbed in the private world of an invented child's game and sulking about attending a Christmas party, the older brother in Lynne Ramsay's film Gasman (1997) pours a snowfall of sugar over a toy car. Some filmmakers shine a bright light that blurs the intimate, the indistinct and the fugitive. Ramsay shines a flashlight here and there, in an open, daring, quietly confident manner and with an acute eye to the particulars that inform. Within families a lot happens on the periphery and the most telling details are often seen out of the corner of one's eye. Every family, as the viewer can see in Ramsay's films, has a shorthand language of gesture and sound that is peculiarly private yet universally understood.

Ramsay's use of sound and the silent gravity of her pictures magnifies subtle inner movements. Exquisitely attuned to the ability of sound to conjure and modulate the inner fluctuations and private gestures of emotional life, she pulls the viewer into an intimacy with her characters. Sound and image work in a kind of correspondence. Though the narrative is driven by a cinematography of masterfully composed shots that often radiate inwardness, the true veracity of emotion lies in her use of music and both diegetic and non-diegetic sound to pinpoint, extend, deepen and fracture feeling. Often three sound spaces are used in a scene to establish place, to continue the narrative line and to balloon or condense in the emotional space. As a young boy slowly shrouds himself in a curtain in the dreamy opening scene of Rat-catcher (1999), the muffled voices of children at play, a slow rumble and a spell-like booming quiet act together as a portent of death. It is often one aspect of the soundscape, though, that stays with the viewer: the simple sounds of the television as Margaret Anne and James sit on the couch eating sandwiches after scrubbing each other's lice-infested scalps; a twangy sound that loosens and resonates as if something newly discovered inside is expanding as James rides the bus to the outskirts of Glasgow.

The hypnotic ethereality of the opening image is suddenly broken as Ryan's alarmed mother unwraps the boy from the window curtain cocoon and scolds him with the combination of worry and fear that hounds mothers in this Glasgow ghetto. Mothers barely survive a mean existence between nursing drunken husbands, hiding from the rent collector and comforting other mothers who have lost children to quirk accidents.

Ratcatcher, Ramsay's first feature-length film, takes place in the midst of a trash collector's strike. The accumulating sacks of garbage hem in the already beleaguered characters and the film's title derives from a game the boys play beating the garbage bags to flush out rats. The story centers around 12-year-old James who was the last to see Ryan alive. Horsing around in the canal slinging mudballs and splashing water, Ryan grabs James and holds his head underwater. Furiously fighting his way to the surface, James pushes Ryan and runs home. Unknown to James, Ryan falls back into a whirlpool and is sucked under. When the body is discovered, James does not come forward or speak to anyone of the incident, silently holding himself responsible for his friend's death. Watchful and introverted by nature, his child's face seems an impassive, weighted mask. His parents, busy struggling with their own lives, do not see the changes in their son.

A scar slashing across his face from some past unmentioned brawl, the father stumbles through life, fixed on football matches on the telly, savoring the flirtatious adoration of his youngest daughter, and seeking comfort in the liquid camaraderie of the local bar. He speaks heedlessly to his son: "don't you have a pal... bring me a beer..." and disregards his son's television viewing, wordlessly switching the channel to football. He has botched the one escape route the family had dared to hope for by sleeping late the day administrators arrive to screen applicants for new housing. Caught in poverty's steel jaws, he lashes out and blames his son for answering the door and letting the housing officials in while he was hung over and unprepared. James runs out of the house to seek comfort in the platonic tenderness of 14-year-old Margaret Anne, an unlikely friendship inaugurated when he covered her body with his own rather than take a turn after the boys in Matt Monroe's gang had their way with her. James grows shaky and bewildered when he sees her once again taking turns with the boys in a garden shed and jumps on the bus to escape to the housing construction site outside the city that he imagines as his new home. Did he expect their friendship would somehow save her from herself? He is without self-pity but stunned by life. His friend Kenny, the clairvoyant (or just watchful) kid who lives in his own addled world but sees everything, believes he sent his white mouse, Snowball, on a balloon trip to the moon. James maintains a playful kindness toward him until, as his inner conflict hardens, at the end of the film he accuses Kenny of killing Snowball, slashing at his friend's innocent whimsy.