God Help the Girl aims to be a complex reflection on the creation of music, mental illness and eating disorders. For the most part, I felt it succeeded. It's a twee little thing, but it works well (I do seem to have a fondness for twee, so take your tolerance for it into account).
The film is about a flexible Freudian trio: for the most part, Eve functions as the Ego, but towards the end she functions as a Id, while Cassie represents the Ego. James, however, consistently reflected the Id, with his talk of "not having the band name conversation". Cassie, James and Eve are in a band together, where they want to enter the pantheon of pop.
In a good film (and book), I don't think the plot is as important as whatever the author is aiming to make you feel-and honestly, I was enthralled by this movie. I adored the unromanticised depiction of eating disorder, balanced by the heavily romanticised act of making music. It made sense to balance the two out.
Eve and James were well developed, and I liked the two, but I felt Cassie was a little bit two-dimensional. Her background was never fully explained-she's from England, I guess? Nothing else was talked about when it comes to her. I could tell that Eve and James came to Murdoch, but Cassie was always a blank space whenever he thought of her. He didn't put much work into her besides that.
I'm focusing mainly on the flaws here because I really liked it and want to balance it a bit, but the music sequences also annoyed me. It's like the film was embarrassed of being a musical. While certain aspects of the music video style worked well (see: Musician Please Take Heed, where the film portrays later plot development quickly as they happen), the fashion was a double-edged sword (see: also Musician Please Take Heed, where "the girl [Eve] knows" never appears elsewhere).
Rating: four stars out of six
No comments:
Post a Comment