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My Darling in Stirling
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Like, Realising Stuff
An independently financed, low-budget movie made with a small, tight and wholly committed cast and crew (including director of photography Werner Lach and production designer Chloe Jade Keays), My Darling in Stirling happens to be, of all things, a musical. Completely musical, from beginning to end, in the vein of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which is prominently cited as chief inspiration in the final credits. The ‘continuous operetta’ mode is a difficult challenge for any filmmaker. It’s not easy to find the right dramatic rhythm or respiration for its unfolding; Demy himself went for a more regular (but rarely less dazzling) distribution of song and spoken dialogue in his later musicals. As in Umbrellas, the chosen musical mode provides for a certain comedy of everyday but stylised speech. Where Michel Legrand (Demy’s composer) went for the jazzy off-beats to keep the quotidian on its toes, Mousoulis emphasises, instead, the on-beats, the regularities, the repetitions. For example, this is café waiter Nick (Henry Cooper) addressing two new customers: Christine (Lisa Boothey) and Jenny (Tina Crawford). Imagine it in song.
In this vein, there are plenty of responses of “OK” and similar mundanities. Occasionally, the lines stretch to lyrical or poetic aphorisms, but even these tend to follow a script of the type of self-help maxims we hear all the time in ordinary life. In possibly the drollest running gag of the piece, a slacker-type teen (Joshua Blenkiron as Jason) is so laid-back and chilled that he can hardly hit a single note correctly. Ah, so it’s a Bill Mousoulis film then, of course! For at least 40 years now (count them!), his cinema has stalked the small but devastating dramas of everyday relationships: the disappointments, rifts, disillusionments, separations, epiphanies … with, almost always on the ultimate horizon, some glimmer of optimism and hope, even if that ray of brightness is concentrated (Éric Rohmer-style) in the tiniest fluctuation of mood-uplift, the sense of a new day and an as-yet-ungrasped possibility emerging … In this, Mousoulis’ films make a great double with those of his comrade Anna Kannava (1959-2011) – and little wonder that the central character of My Darling in Stirling, Emma (Amelie Dunda), is glimpsed in the proximity of Anna’s posthumously published novel, Stefanos of Limassol (Ilura Press, 2012). My Darling in Stirling is a story of young love, filtered through the subjectivity of Emma (Dunda has a wide-open face that the camera truly loves). She has a passion for reading, and a yearning for wider horizons of life experience (she chooses a favourite T-shirt to wear, emblazoned with the Americanised slogan “Like, realizing stuff”). Both things will materialise for her, for a time, in Stirling, which she visits by car and bus (such details of ordinariness are insisted on, just in the way that Víctor Erice underlines the banal but vital presence of mobile phones in Cerrar los ojos [2023]). In the above-mentioned café, Emma is drawn to Nick, and an intimate relationship blooms. As always in Mousoulis, grief and melancholia line the main narrative context: Christine has lost her beloved son, and has kept his bedroom intact … until, that is, Emma moves in. Eventually, the Emma/Nick relationship takes a nasty turn (I won’t spoil the film’s one big plot point!), and a sizeable chunk of the film is devoted to the gloom of depression. The Demy reference swings back in during an epilogue-type sequence when Emma (having resumed her university studies) bumps into Nick on the street: it’s among the most beautiful scenes that Mousoulis has ever done. The film, which Mousoulis describes as a “community effort”, is also about a seemingly special, even paradisal place: Stirling in Adelaide (Australia). On this level, it reminded me of Tom Cowan’s wholly charming Orange Love Story (2004), set in the city of Orange (New South Wales). My Darling in Stirling out-Rohmers Rohmer on this front: we have not the conventional opposition of Suburb (where Emma’s mother lives) and Big City (Adelaide, to which Nick heads), but a triangulation of Suburb, Big City and Village. This much is made clear by a charming (and very Mousoulisian) side-detail: the story opens with the ‘last run’ of a local suburban postman (Mike Foenander as Richard) – a character who will fleetingly and tantalisingly reappear, in passing, much later on. Stirling, by contrast, is the lightly magical site – the opening montage of coloured trees and ducks crossing the street is enchanting – where hearts and minds (thanks to its bookstores) run free. In an echo of the delightful near-amateur-theatrics of Jacques Rivette’s musical Haut bas fragile (1995), dance is mostly suppressed (à la Resnais) as an accompaniment to song – but when some playful swaying and twirling at last peeks in, it’s really lovely. Musical-mutation-wise, My Darling In Stirling, to my ears at least, leans more to the mixed-pop melange of Sparks’ score for Leos Carax’s Annette (2021) than to the (sometimes maddening) churning melodic key-shifts of Legrand and subsequent emulators in the field. This doubtless has much to do with the unusual way that My Darling in Stirling’s music track was assembled. We are well used to the convention of the musical genre whereby the visible actor mimes to another singer’s recorded playback – something that is almost the rule for everyone here. But the synthetic process goes much further. Mousoulis credits himself as “song designer”; that signifies he wrote the melodies and lyrics, but the music itself (as both composition and recorded performance) is sourced from the Free Music Archive online (the site is worth browsing if all this is foreign to you, as it was to me). Marshalling so many diverse tracks keeps the musical changes (and sub-genres) fresh (as Sparks also managed to do). The aesthetic trade-off, however, is that the transitions from song to song (those all-important hinges that Alain Resnais and Bruno Fontaine worked on so assiduously for Same Old Song [1997] and Not on the Lips [2003]) exist far less in My Darling in Stirling, except as ‘smash cuts’ from one scene to the next. I felt a little pang of regret every time there was a necessary fast-fade-out of both image and sound, registering as tiny rifts in the aesthetic fabric of the whole. And speaking of wholes: if there’s any previous maker of film musicals that My Darling in Stirling reminds me of particularly, it’s not so much Demy as another super-low-budget hero – director-writer-actor-producer Paul Vecchiali (1930-2023). Especially his A vot’ bon cœur (2004), a bittersweet musical about film funding (!) that Mousoulis could well have made in a parallel universe! And, as it happens, in his youthful days as a critic for Cahiers du cinema (no. 165) Vecchiali grabbed the task of reviewing (under the article title “Lost Horizons”) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on its initial release in May ’64 – prompting his reflection that “cinema is not a language, not even a sum of languages, but an art that proceeds as a whole, and this already at the level of the shot”. When I today read Vecchiali remarking, in a footnote, that Demy’s “respect for the audience” is signalled by “the perfection of its playback miming, the crispness of the edits, the fluidity of the shot changes, and the scrupulous exactness of the sound”, it helps me admire the evident leap that Mousoulis has made in My Darling in Stirling: the discipline of shooting and cutting to music has imposed a happy rigour on his regular style, and enabled a new energy and drive. The 79 minutes breeze by like one continuous song … which is exactly what this “fairy-tale realist musical” (as Mousoulis describes it) aims to be. I haven’t seen every film by Bill Mousoulis, but this one may well be his best – or, at least, my favourite. MORE Mousoulis: A Sufi Valentine © Adrian Martin 2 October 2023 |
