Kudos to Lynne Ramsay

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Lynne Ramsay Sarajevo International Film Festival

VERDICT: The revered Scottish writer-director has carved a slender but unique body of work thanks to her uncompromising attitude and bold stylistic choices.

We need to talk about Lynne Ramsay. One of Britain’s most revered and original independent film-makers, the Glasgow-born writer-director is heading to Sarajevo film festival this week to receive an honorary Heart of Sarajevo award for her body of work. Ramsay’s formidable reputation precedes her, with two BAFTAs, four major Cannes prizes, and at least a dozen festival awards to her name. Which is all the more impressive given her slender body of work, just four full-length features in a career spanning almost 30 years.

As a woman from a working-class background, major kudos is due to Ramsay for breaking multiple glass (and class) ceilings to become an internationally feted auteur film-maker. She remains a rare figure in the boys club of directors, who typically come into this very macho, competitive environment armed with more financial and social capital. In a 2020 interview with the UK film industry body BAFTA, Ramsay cited “being short” and “having a Glaswegian accent” as career obstacles.

That said, Ramsay looks back on her childhood in a poor district of Glasgow as both advantage and disadvantage. It certainly provided rich creative inspiration for her hauntingly lyrical debut feature Ratcatcher (1999), a unique fusion of social realism, painterly visuals and bittersweet nostalgia. “You make the best of your environment,” she told Indiewire in 2000. “It shapes you, but even if it’s a tough environment it doesn’t kill your imagination.”

Fortunately for Ramsay, her low-income family was rich in other ways. Her parents were film lovers, introducing her to classic Hollywood melodramas, Sirk and Hitchcock, Lana Turner and Bette Davis. She credits early childhood viewings of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Don’t Look Now (1973) as intensely affecting, life-changing experiences. In her teens, she discovered art-house titans like Fassbinder, Bergman and Tarkovsky, with Ukrainian-American director Maya Deren’s avant-garde short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and David Lynch’s mind-bending psycho-noir Blue Velvet (1985) each leaving a deep impression.

Ramsay came to directing through fine art, photography and cinematography, all of which clearly inform her work. She deserves special kudos for her exacting attention to formal detail, particularly editing and cinematography, music and sound design. Her scores in particular are always adventurous choices, from dipping in and out of the avant-rock mix-tape that insulates Samantha Morton’s blissfully detached heroine from her amoral actions in Morvern Callar (2002), to the throbbing drones and crackles that Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood weaves into the densely layered audioscapes of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017).

A series of feted DIY short films showcased Ramsay’s nascent talents, notably the Cannes prize-winners Small Deaths (1996) and Gasman (1997). Between long-gestating feature projects, she has sporadically returned to the shorter format, winning a BAFTA award for Swimmer (2012), a radiantly beautiful monochrome dreamscape layered with personal homages to classic British cinema, which was originally commissioned for the London Olympics but which lives on as a sublime stand-alone artwork.

Special kudos is due to Ramsay for maintaining her uncompromising vision, often casting non-professionals alongside big stars, and pushing for an experimental aesthethic even with relatively mainstream material. Sometimes this has meant sacrificing big paychecks to avoid diluting her high-art approach. Most infamously, she walked out of directing Natalie Portman in the revenge western Jane Got a Gun (2015) after creative differences with the producers. Her reputation took a hit, but she also dodged a bullet, as the finished film later became a resounding critical and commercial bomb.

“I’ve got a reputation for being difficult,” Ramsay told the Guardian in 2018, “and yet with my crew and my cast, I’m super-collaborative and we get on really well, and they like working with me. So to me that always feels like bullshit.” Making a compromised film is doing the audience a disservice, she argues, hence the need to stick to her guns. “If you do that when you’re a guy, you’re seen as artistic – ‘difficulty’ is seen as a sign of genius. But it’s not the same for women.”

Ramsay has a special flair for audaciously re-imagined literary adaptations. In Sarajevo she will host an open air gala screening of her most recent feature, You Were Never Really Here (2017), which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a severely traumatised hit-man trying to save a teenage girl from a powerful sex trafficking ring. By extensively reworking the Jonathan Ames source novel, elevating a fairly straight revenge thriller into a sense-swamping, psychologically intense film noir, Ramsay won universally positive reviews plus two major Cannes prizes.

She may not be prolific, but kudos to Ramsay for tirelessly sticking to her high creative standards with ever more ambitious projects. In recent years she been developing several features including a radical remix of Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick set in space, an Amazon-backed adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s short story Stone Mattress, co-starring Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh, and a screen version of Ariana Harwicz’s “motherhood horror” novel Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence. Earlier this year she confirmed all three are still tentatively active.

Crucially, while Ramsay’s films are always visually striking and lightly experimental, her unorthodox aesthethic choices never come at the expense of character or emotion. A rare balance between dramatic authenticity and fine-art values is her signature style. “It’s going beyond the surface that excites me,” she told BAFTA in 2020. “I think people can sense when something is phoney. That’s what I find so powerful about film-making, when you can be transported without really knowing why. It appeals to the senses like music.”

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023