SLIFF 2009 Review: HELEN

Joy is a popular college-age girl with a handsome boyfriend, loving parents, and many friends and band-mates. Helen’s the same age but an awkward, unsmiling outcast who’s grown up in an orphanage. Joy vanishes in a park one day, presumably the victim of foul play, and Helen is chosen to play Joy in a video reenactment the police are making in hopes of solving the case. Joy’s fate is replaced by the reality of Helen’s life and that is the premise of the new Irish film HELEN, an interesting variation on the idea of duality that is hampered by a deliberately slow pace, wooden performances, and vague storytelling.

Helen (Annie Townsend) finds Joy’s life much more interesting than her own and takes to wearing Joy’s yellow coat, flirting with her boyfriend (Danny Groenland) and even accepting help with her studies from Joy’s parents (Sandie Malia and Joseph Jobling). She steals a baby photo of Joy and tells people it’s her. On her 18th birthday, the orphanage administrator informs Helen she can open her files and learn about her birth parents. “Why would I want to look at that?â€� Helen wonders. Lacking ambition and dreams, she’s enjoying her hijacking of Joy’s life as it’s given her own some worth. As we learn more about Helen’s sad past, which never included the human contact that Joy’s life apparently did, Helen’s actions become clearer.

Co-directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy carefully stage their debut film with deliberate detachment with every scene way underplayed for effect. All dialogue is delivered in the same turgid monotone regardless of context and the actors seem to be in a near-catatonic state. This makes sense for the title character but I’m not sure what the film is trying to say by having Joy’s parents and friends act like zombies as well. At 79 scant yet endless minutes HELEN barely has time to make much of an impression. Though slow, it does have a creepy, hypnotic quality and it got under my skin on a certain level but it’s mostly a self-indulgent exercise in arthouse pretentiousness and tedium (the musical score, which sounds like a tornado warning, doesn’t help). Also, it’s sometimes unclear if what we are watching is dream or reality. For example, Helen asks Joy’s boyfriend to take her virginity, and when we cut to a shot of them in a room at the hotel where she works as a maid, it’s vague as to whether we are inside or outside of Helen’s head. HELEN starts out as a mystery, but Joy’s disappearance quickly becomes an afterthought and no attempt is made to solve the crime but it’s not that kind of movie. and by the end of the film Joy’s fate and Helen’s intentions, if she has any, remain frustratingly mysterious.

HELEN will screen at the Frontenac on Saturday, November 14th at 3:15pm and on Sunday, November 15th at 5:15pm during the 18th Annual Whitaker Saint Louis International Film Festival.