Helen

Saw this at the 2008 Sydney Film Festival so apologies if I'm short on detail.

This film does look good, with an all-pervasive dreamy quality. That said, the vocabulary of camera movements is eventually too meagre and repetitive. At times it seems that every shot is a slow dolly.

Like Bloomer wrote in hir comment, the acting and dialog is peculiarly stilted. I initially took this for a deliberate ironic or alienating effect and I read the film as a satire of English New-Labour era 'caring'. The scenes with the teacher, policewoman and social worker all stuck with me for this reason.

But by the end I was forced to conclude that the awkwardness was unintentional and I that I have an overactive imagination. As Alan Donald commented, this film's virtues are simply overwhelmed by bad acting and direction.

The low budget British/Irish was film divided critics in the UK, some did not like it but others including the highly respected Mark Kermode loved it. But the audience reaction on IMDb has been negative (amidst from a low base) and this is an example of a divide between critics and audiences over some lesser known films.

Set in an unnamed town in England or Ireland a teenage girl disappears and the police plan to conduct a reconstruction for investigation. A girl from the same college, Helen (Annie Townsend) is picked to play Joy. Helen is a girl who has been in care since a young age and she soon compares her life to Joy's and slowly gets to know Joy's love ones as well as being given the opportunity to finally find out about her past on her 18th Birthday.

Helen is an experimental film, it was directed by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, a directing duo who previously worked on short films. Helen is essentially a short film stretched to become a (short) feature length film because of the extremely slow pacing. There short films and Helen are filmed using a special technique that relies on shooting on 35mm cameras, long shots and unprofessional, local actors. The acting is big problem with this feature because of a lot of it stiff, wooden or just down right bad. Townsend was best when she was alone playing a meek, quiet gorl who is actually longing for more and speaks to Joy on the path she would have taken but at times it felt like she had not personality at all and did not have one written for her. An example of bad acting is with the parents who just seems so stiff and no emotion even though their daughter has disappeared: normally they is some sort of reaction to a tragic event like that.

They is a nice, quiet visial to the film, it is not grand or grim and gritty. I personally like long takes, long shots for the most part. I particularly like the visuals in the woods and the park. This gave Helen a more natural feel. But at other times I felt the film needed a cut to break thinks up and see another action/reaction. Maybe it is because the camera was in the wrong place or simply the acting was not good enough, compared to a 10 minute scene in Hunger that was one take and it was really compelling because of the acting. Helen's scene just drag and the film breaks basic screen writing rules like enter late, leave early: it does the opposite.

I was also slightly confused by the setting because the police uniforms looked like they were not from the UK and the accents were all over the place, some of Liverpulian, others Irish and some just general English. The filmmakers should have stuck to a board area of the UK to show that this could happen anywhere. Also elements of the police investigation felt really fault, like getting a local girl to play Joy, wouldn't the police get an actor from outside so family and friends would not have any ties to the person or when the police find the jacket they would have to keep as evidence and keep it in the evidence bag.

There were some really good ideas in Helen but it could have been explored. It starts out well enough showing Joy with her walking with her mates in the park and when she goes off alone it is the last time never to be seen again. It would be a good start to a thriller. The story could have gone in a number of directions, like the parents trying to do what happened to their daughter or the stress seeing some random girl trying to be their daughter, maybe friends of Joy questioning why Helen is trying to be like Joy and take over her live, the parents seeing Helen and confuse her for Joy, the impact of the disappearance on the college and the community or Helen seeing she looks similar to Joy and tries to find one more about the girl and even tries to take her boyfriend. Or it simply could be a girl who lived in care tries to find out more about her own past.

Helen is interesting it does have a good idea behind it but the execution was lacking.

A drama about a teenager, Helen, who has been in care for most of her life.

A student at the local school Helen attends has gone missing and Helen volunteers to take the part of the missing girl in a police reconstruction. She gradually immerses herself in the role of the missing student and meets the girl's parents possibly as a way of trying to find what was missing from her own life in care and possibly as a way of finding her own identity.

A nice idea for a story but not big enough for a feature length film. A slow movie which is patchy in places.

The film is awful! I only saw this because the rental company thinks it is the similarly named film 'Helen', starring Ashley Judd.

In this UK/Irish Helen, the acting is terribly stilted, the film constantly uses the same slowly panning camera technique which just becomes tedious. You can see pauses where the actors are trying to recall dialogue etc.

I've got to be honest, I think all this lottery funding is continuing to lead to hopeless UK films being funded and produced. I don't know why this film would have won an award.

The only think I can say is that technical of film and props etc was good.

The film-making team deserved ten points for having the right connexions to fund this film. Sadly have become so obsessed with shooting in scope they have forgotten any other element that might make the end product interesting. British critics love anything to do with identity. Make a film remotely along the lines of Hitchcock's Vertigo and they will fall over themselves praising it to heaven. Endless shots of tree leaves . A lead actress with the total on screen charisma of a potted plant. Antonioni used spacial dynamics to stunning effect long before this pair turned up. I thought I would go nuts if another shot arrived with a long slow dolly shot. But hey this is the sort of thing lottery funders and arts councils love to cultivate. Dull. Badly acted. It should have stayed as a short.