It would seem that this picture, and indeed, so to speak, youth. I do not like to divide the movie into age categories, but in the case of this picture it will be a saving ray of light in the not entirely cloudless cluster of modern teen movies. There are plenty of bad pictures, and teen/hipster ones in particular, yes, but God Help The Girl is not one of them.
Here we are told about a girl with mental disorders and about her kind of escapism - through songwriting.
Yeah, maybe not the most original setup. But with. He plunges into a very upbeat mood when you want, like the heroes of the film, to sing songs and wander until the morning in the night city, raft on the river and lie on the grass, looking at the sky. Such films are needed, simply in order to feel such an unbearable ease of being.
And all this is transmitted through very memorable songs that move the plot, no less attractive camera work, good acting and just wonderful costumes. Here, of course, there were a couple of meaningless storylines and boring dialogue, but in general, the film deserves to be appreciated.
8 out of 10
A strange movie with no less strange actors. Once I came across this picture and saw Browning and Murray in the lead roles, it was decided it was worth watching. The UK as a creator has also pushed me, as the country's films and TV series are usually distinguished by their unique soulfulness.
Eva is a young woman who is a patient in a hospital where she tries to control and heal her emotions. But the heroine is not happy to be imprisoned in the four walls of a medical institution, so from time to time she goes into real life to feel like a normal person. Thanks to her experiences and vivid impressions of everything that happens, the girl begins to sing songs. In early summer, Eva escapes from the hospital again and finds musical friends with whom she wants to form a band. Everything seems fine, but in life there are always many aspects that make you worry and worry. Will Eve be able to cope with everything?
To be honest, I expected something completely different from the film, the description is too small to have a more or less clear picture in your head, so imagine everything in your own way. I expected to see something really deep with interesting thoughts that make you think, because the main character still with a little hello. The plot of the film is also some kind of unclear, sometimes what happens sharply switches to other actions, memories or emotions of the heroine, so you often get lost and lose the thread of all events. In addition to the main actions, the beginning and end of the tape are also incomprehensible, everything is somehow crumpled and absurd. Apart from the meaningless and not always connected actions, the whole picture is filled with indie songs that I don’t like. So I was expecting to see something more serious and catchy like most British films, but I only got some kind of children's movie for 12-13 years that doesn't have any meaning or consistency.
I really like the two actresses who play the main roles, they usually get very colorful characters and look at their play is a pleasure, but in this case their heroines in the film are simply no. In my opinion, they did not even have a reason to reveal themselves, just incomprehensible characters, yes, well sung, but nothing more. The main character performed by Ollie Alexandra also left me absolutely indifferent that he is, that he is not. I also saw that many people note the amazing camera work, which I did not like at all, there are some incomprehensible shots, a dramatically different manner of shooting, all in some heterogeneous style. The picture is also incoherent, like the film itself.
The tape I could barely master, as it came out very boring, with not always understandable events and some strange songs. I’ll give a neutral rating, not a negative one, just for the presence of good actresses in the film and flashing beautiful landscapes. There is nothing more special in this picture, no sense, no good music, no interesting thoughts. It's a mindless hipster creation.
The movie turned out without sharp corners, in some places with a strongly sagging plot, with normal acting, “cute” editing and beautiful songs. Everything in order.
A girl with anorexia. First, the actress looks very healthy, not thin, with plump cheeks and lips. Secondly, eating disorder is shown not from the side of a difficult to overcome obstacle in the way of a young girl, but from the side of a mild illness with the pretended sufferings of the main character. The problem has not been solved at all. What brought Eva to this life? What I saw did not cause sympathy for the girl, did not inspire fear, did not give rise to reflection. Just beautiful, almost glossy suffering.
The plot is weak. Maybe this is not the most important component for the musical, but here the narrative is smooth, giving pauses for understanding, so such a presentation reveals all the plot holes. The main storyline and secondary ones sag. The characters are cardboard. Heroes, as they were not clear who at the beginning, and remained them until the end. The film lacked seriousness, everything turned out childishly and contrived. If during the viewing and saw something really tragic, then immediately confused by a cheerful song to a ridiculous dance.
The actress Emily Browning looks much higher than acting. Such a film required a cute main character, where there is no need for special skill. Ollie Alexander (which is why I started watching the movie) played as usual. He didn’t give out something brilliant, but he coped with the role. The heroine of Hannah Murray seemed to just pass near the set, so she had nowhere to play, although Hannah is a very promising actress.
It was clear that the camera had a person who knew his business. The picture is beautiful, with different effects. I really liked the landscapes, the costumes of the heroes were chosen with a sense of style, which is also a small plus.
I was surprised that music blended harmoniously into the story. The lyrics are written with love. But it was so monotonous and boring that at the end of the film, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d heard it before. The music is good, but for an amateur. I don’t think she’s making the movie.
A young girl named Eva is undergoing rehabilitation in a psychiatric hospital. On the advice of her doctor, she finds something that allows her to distract from her problems, and she begins to write songs. Subsequently, the passion goes to the creation of a real (albeit little-known) musical group, and later to the fact that it sooner or later “finds itself”.
However, the integrity of the film is almost absent. More to say – it at first glance resembles a set of quite interesting clips for no less fascinating songs, which at once turns the movie into a musical. In the intervals between the songs, the relationship between the band members is gradually revealed, or certain actions of the heroine are shown, which lead her to a half-moving, but quite logical for a film with such an idea. Ideology revolves around the growing up and drama of adolescence.
Nevertheless, the movie is quite easy and interesting, and the songs attract some strange magnetism, because in this film Australian Browning reveals herself not only as an actress, but also as a singer with a very melodic voice. Therefore, the movie is highly recommended to her fans, because Eve, in a sense, is her unique and most memorable role.
And if you are not a fan of Browning, and in general accidentally got to the film, then he will please you with his ease and sense of teenage romanticism.
The warmth and light of this movie. There's no other way. It was as if I had been taken from my drenched and gray autumn and plunged into a summer so teenage when every event has the effect of a bombshell, when you want to make global plans, when everything is so new and so important. This is the only film you can love.
Yes, friends, I understand that this is a clip film, the hipsters are damned, everything is too beautiful, there is no “depth” and “sociality”, which, apparently, should be under every blade of grass, leaf and twig. That again we have a suffering but talented girl, singing sad songs, breaking the hearts of boys and changing her dress all the time. But, praise to the gods, the director and actors had enough character and will to keep the atmosphere of lightness, and even frivolous, but freedom. That’s great, folks, there aren’t many movies like that right now. It's like a good friend, like it's holding your hand and saying, '". Hey, it's not all lost yet. Someday you will achieve everything.
It is also worth watching because of the Browning-Olly Alexander tandem, the two are chemically similar to Eisenberg and Stewart, only more gentle. Years&Years - Take Shelter. Everyone with their roles cope with a hurrah, even sweet-voiced Browning, which in this film has even a little character. The music and camera work are wonderful, so many cute details, beautiful angles, delicious combinations of colors - wow! Beautiful!
I will remove quite a few points for small plot joints and small sags in development, but since this is the debut work of the director, everything is forgivable.
8 out of 10
According to the description and trailer, I expected that there would be some light film with songs in indie rock style, with beautiful girls and boys in strange clothes, with an unnatural attraction to antiquity. Expectations are fully justified and nothing went beyond them - for this in our time, the authors of the film can at least be respected.
A young girl with anorexia and apparently some concomitant mental disorders (yes, another item of the long hipster list of this picture) escapes from the hospital and meets a curly boy at a concert - a mediocre musician with a big heart who is imbued with her problems and helps solve them through a kind of musical therapy. The two of them, having invited another girl to whom the guy gives music lessons, create a group, and Eva, immersed in the problems of her formation, such as choosing a name, recruiting session musicians and of course writing songs, distracts herself from her difficulties, and in the end I would not say that she is cured, but rather grows out of her problems. However, as from all her surroundings, but this is already part of the storyline of the relationship, which is also in the film.
Young beautiful characters, with problems far from the world, shot with a “light” camera often with different filters, sing about their feelings in an indie style – all aimed at making the film as hipster as possible, but everything is not as bad as it seems. First of all, I mean the songs. Usually in musicals, they are built into the narrative very “crooked”, and in the end everything looks like it is sewn with white threads, because musicals often have problems with the integrity of the plot. Here, the lyrics seem to be written under the plot, although everything is just the opposite, these lyrics are incredibly accurate, and besides, they are extraordinary, which smooths out the monotony inherent in indie music. Also, the authors abandoned the usual visual design of songs with dance numbers in most cases, everything is done more in the style of the music video. Personally, these two things seemed to me to be successful decisions, and since the quality of the songs and the accompanying numbers are fundamental points for the musical, I think it was a success.
“God Help the Girl” is a lightweight light-hearted musical that can give the viewer the same light mood, if he in turn is able to feel the atmosphere that the picture creates. For fans and people without prejudice to the hipster style, films about teenagers, read children's problems, the tape will definitely brighten up two hours of life.
For a full color scheme, I will add a neutral color to previous reviews. But not only for the palette of colors, but also because the impression of the film remained the same – neutral.
In order.
Stuart Murdoch’s first attempt was not a complete failure. But to be honest, very much reeking of frank imitation, clearly shining through the entire film, the idols of the director, (personal assumption). There are traces and prints of Godard, Woody Allen, François Ozon, Christophe Honore and, for sure, the picky viewer will add a couple more pillars of cinema.
The plot is average, but it is possible for originality and does not pretend. Because the calculation was most likely not on the storyline, but on other components of the film, which are the main value of this work.
That's it.
The cast.
Emily Browning, in my opinion, is a talented and promising actress, but has not yet found herself in a real dramatic movie. At the moment, Emily, unfortunately, has established herself as an actress of one genre, or rather one role - "victims". In almost all of her roles, she is desperately resisting, struggling, and still a "victim" as in this film. But this picture, unlike the others, showcases another hitherto little-known talent for Emily, her voice. She turns out to be a wonderful singer. Her voice sounds the same in the film with questionable characteristics, designed for aggressive teenagers and fans of computer “shooters”, ie in “Forbidden reception”, but this fact is not known. But by the way, here, as well as in Z. P., the director for some reason shows her in an unfavorable image for her, however, at the very end, Emily is terribly not suitable for discolored hair, she looks vulgar with them, went and older by 15 years.
Two more young actors Ollie Alexander and Hannah Murray, so harmoniously and naturally fell into the images of their characters that just more and say nothing, it seems that they played themselves.
It is impossible not to mention the truly masterful and highly artistic camera work of Jills Nutgens. I think I will not be mistaken if I say that all its beauty the film owes to him, because the hand of the master is recognizable here by his other famous works.
But the main advantage of the film is the music. I never managed to find out who the composer is, but judging by the fact that Stuart Murdoch is a musician and the leader of the band Belle & Sebastian involved in the film, the music obviously belongs to them. And that is exactly the reason and the whole point of making this film.
So, to summarize, I can say that I recommend this film to fans of hipster culture and fans of indie rock in the style of the 60s. And it is better to perceive it as a long full-length clip, not looking for much meaning and philosophy in the plot.
For several years I have not written reviews, but here I could not pass. Maybe it’s because I don’t want anyone to miss this picture because I don’t know what to expect from them. And you can expect from her an incredible aftertaste of the beauty and tragedy of this life, which you only feel in your 20-somethings.
In the winter of 2009, I was a miserable sight. I was 15 years old and my heart was broken. In those days, everything seemed grim, hopeless and collapsed. Anyone who was disappointed in love at that age will understand. I used to spend my nights on the internet looking for something better than my sad life. Among other things, I discovered the band’s unremarkable album of the same name, God Help the Girl. I listened to him and I got hooked, almost every song was about me. It was like I sat down and sang the whole album. All the joy and all the pain, all the magnificent unbearable ease of being, everything was there. I listened to this album day and night. For the sake of interest, I also looked for information about him and found out that this is a young project of one musician who comes up with a full-fledged musical based on these songs. He is looking for money to make a film, but there is no money. And the songs are there, and they were beautiful.
Over the next five years, there were many events that only a young girl could experience on the threshold of adulthood. Graduation from school, study at the university, moving from apartment to apartment, travel from country to country, the end of some eras and the beginning of new, infinitely valuable experience, many new people, many new events, new loves and again broken hearts, moments of despair, black stripes, losses, familiar rakes.
I used to sing, “God help the girl, she needs all the help she can get.” God help the girl, she needs all the help she can get. And in the soul immediately became easy and free. It was my secret pill for melancholy, only you could use it whenever and anywhere.
I finally saw a movie that was based on these songs. A beautiful musical with great and beloved actors, all the color of young British cinema. Only one day, one session at the festival. All the circumstances turned out so that it was easier not to go: it pours all day on the street, left work later than usual, finishing things before vacation, her best friend could not keep company, and trains in the subway moved at prohibitively long intervals due to a suicide attempt on my branch. But I still got there.
In one of the fragments, the hero of the film says that our life, all its events and moments are much more valuable than we think. And it's true. And in another fragment, the heroine, tormented by serious mental problems, tells how, being absolutely unbeliever, came to a woman who practiced Christian healing. She simply put her on the table, covered her with a blanket, asked her to close her eyes and made some passes and movements with her hands. And at some point, the heroine felt through closed eyelids as over her bowed man, infinitely strong and kind. And she was at once so calm, and she was lying down and saying something like, "I'll be fine, I'll be fine, I'll be fine, I'll be fine." And then I realized that it was a prayer from her mouth.
And at that moment, I was sitting in the audience and I realized that for years, much more than I had listened to and sang to myself, someone was also leaning over me and giving me the feeling that I was going to be okay and I was going to be okay. I just didn’t fully understand it.
All the events and characters around the main character, including her illness, exist solely to give the music enough shape. This is not the music that was written for the film, but the film for the music, so you need to evaluate and perceive this film more with your ears than with your eyes.
Growing up is a very painful stage in everyone’s life. And yet, growing up is more often not in solving some global issues or traveling around Nepal, but in small daily situations, arguing about nonsense with friends, music and trying to understand who you are.
Do not look for deep and hidden meaning everywhere, do not exalt your rich inner world. Just relax and enjoy the music, remembering how it was with you.
10 out of 10
Most of us live a life of being familiar with only one way of presenting material in songs, when every single track written by the same artist and published on the same album is a finished work, in its duration telling one story or raising one topic, which fades when you switch to the next, and despite the fact that many artists’ albums can trace the same face, a single lyrical hero for all songs, the listener very rarely encounters music that can only be understood by listening to the entire disc. But there are groups whose concept is to tell a single story – for example, the Boston hardcore band Defeater in several of their albums tell the story of a family living in a depressed postwar America, which time after time learns new tragedies, swirling in a deadly whirl of addiction, debt, disappointment, misunderstanding and death. Something similar happened to musician and songwriter Stuart Murdoch, who wrote the album God Help The Girl for an indie rock band of the same name, the main character of which was a lonely young girl who spends a lot of time in her room and is consumed, in addition to loneliness and disappointment, by some inner tragedy. Like Alan Parker, who turned one of the Pink Floyd albums into a film, which also told a holistic story, Stuart Murdoch almost from the very beginning got the idea of bringing his musical brainchild to the big screen, working for many years on how to turn it into a life, trying to understand what this girl will be like when she finds a new life in cinema, and what elements need to be added to the story. The result of this creative process was the painting “God Help the Girl”, in the form of a semi-musical, half-film, similar to the one you recently saw in another British film “The Sun over Lith”, which tells about illness, loneliness, and finding yourself, your own, your ideal sound, instrument, song and text.
Like many directors-debutants, Stuart Murdcore has difficulty defining the main line of his film and has not yet “filled his hand” to work with a small timekeeping consistently to reveal many topics that, although they overlap in the lives of the main characters, are separate issues that are better to explore alone. He endows his heroine with a quite serious ailment, a common eating disorder that cripples beautiful girls around the world, which can be very interesting in cinema, because it is not a sufficiently researched topic, mainly presenting itself as another cliché, but in the picture of Stuart Murdoch he boils down to the role that is usually played by wards of mental hospitals, when they in horror and exploitative become a refuge for beautiful girls who have sex and drink blood, a beautiful scenery that with its combination of charm and danger attracts eyes. The director tells us that his character is haunted by terrible fortunes, but shows a kind of well-crafted picture from a magazine that inspires neither sorrow, nor horror, nor loneliness, nor hopelessness, nor, most importantly, understanding. What brought this girl into a hole filled with medicine and completely cleaned for food? What causes her to give up what sustains life and reach for what death is supposed to mean, even though it's probably just a mild illness in a Stuart Murdoch movie? From the mouths of the director and his characters, you hear repeated symptoms, but you can not trace the history of the disease, recognize this fragile girl as something more than a dummy from classic ladies’ tragedies, played out in light music, which would not be superfluous at all, given how much screen time the author of the film “God Help the Girl” devotes to ordinary dialogues that do not carry a semantic load.
“When you’re in high school, things may seem painful, but then you look back and realize that it was an experience that could be used in making art,” James Franco wrote in his book Palo Alto, which later became the film of the same name, and the essence of this statement will be familiar not only to a lover of books or movies, but also to someone whose heart beats to music – no mind untouched by tragedy can write something that will excite for decades to come, and it is not surprising that in his film, Steward Murdoch tried to trace the connection between personal experiences and creativity. Despite the fact that this has been done many times before him, including young directors such as Scott Coffey Into the Adult World, the theme can still be revealed from new angles, as Stuart Murdoch tried to do. Only he chose the most boring and flat questions and manifestations - the search for the name of the group, a small discussion of whether the music should be made for the listener or create it for himself, the battle between cassettes and new musical media, writing songs about a morning walk with a dog, and if the director had an interesting food for reflection, then she immediately got confused by another story about the insincere tragedy of the main character or another empty and vulgar number, so in the end the picture of Stuart Murdoch turned out not to be an interesting person who is engaged in a narrowly upsetting the audience, but rather in the musical circle of which Stewart is intended for others.
