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Helen

dir. Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor / Great Britain, Ireland 2008 / 79’

subtitles: Polish and English

New Horizons International Competition $e11.ou7! – Sell Out!, A Lake, Burrowing, Dazzle, Exhausted, Face, Helen, Hunger, Iréne, Mock up on Mu, Ne change rien, Oxygen, Spyder, Twilight Dancing Section index

Cast

Annie Towsend, Sandie Mahlia, Dennis Jobling, Danny Groenland

Film description

Helen's life has never been easy. Since her childhood, she has lived in an orphanage; in the evening she works as a cleaner at a hotel; she has trouble with virtually every subject at school. She has no friends, family, or dreams. She is alone, killing time. But just before her eighteenth birthday, she gets an unexpected and ambiguous gift from fate - the local police ask Helen to appear on local TV, impersonating Joy, a girl who disappeared without trace. The title character enters the lost girl's life, meets her boyfriend, parents, wears her yellow jacket. Finally, she even starts to speak to Joy.

The first full-length film by the two Irish directors Molloy and Lawlor is an astonishing piece of cinema: like a hypnotic trance. The artists invite us to a medium-sized, clean English town with not mud or dust. The municipal parks are green and school buildings nice. Policemen are big-hearted and good, social workers are helpful and empathic. And all is somehow unreal, aseptic, as if covered with glass which subdues emotions and swelling traumas and dramas. Nobody but Van Sant in his Elephant, has ever spoken about youth so poignantly. The style of Helen is very similar to van Sant's work, but this film is enriched by the undefined fairy-tale aspect.

Jakub Socha