USA
3.5*
Director:
Sean Durkin
Screenwriter:
Sean Durkin
Director of Photography:
Jody Lee Lipes
Running time: 101 minutes
Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn’t do anything wrong, but there is just not enough to hold on to for the film to become beloved. Its main character, Marcy May, real name Martha and telephone name Marlene, has just escaped from a cult on a farm in upstate New York where she has spent quite a bit of time being “purified”, what many in the audience will call “brainwashed”.
The girl has become a young woman who feels comfortable in her own skin but is now faced with a number of problems that need to be resolved for her to integrate into normal society again. The first is the people she left behind, people who seem to be folk of the land, working on the farm to sustain themselves, but whose rare interactions with the rest of society are cold and haunting.
In one of the film’s very first scenes, we see a group of men eating dinner. In the meantime, the women of the house sit and wait patiently on the steps, only making their way to the dinner table once the men, led by Patrick, have finished and left the dining room. Everything is done without question, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.
We struggle to understand the dynamic here. The film offers very little to explain the relationship between Patrick and his men, though it is clear the women are all damaged in some way. However, the main focus is Marcy May, who takes this name when Patrick tells her she doesn’t look like her actual name, Martha. Especially at the beginning, she is the only person on whom the shots focus, even when other people are in the room with her. And yet, we know nothing about her life before she joined.
Most of the film is spent in the company of Marcy May’s sister, Lucy, and her husband of only a few months, Ted. Their beautiful, spacious home next to a lake in Connecticut would seem to be the perfect refuge for the girl they know as Martha to recuperate after her ordeal, but she is haunted by memories of the events on the farm, and her behaviour often veers from the merely awkward to close to the sociopathic. One can laugh when she takes off her clothes to go and swim in the lake, but it becomes a bit disturbing when she can’t sleep and therefore decides to curl up in bed next to Lucy and Ted while they are having sex.
We realise over time how her words are mere copies of what she has been told by the cult’s psychologically affecting Patrick, who also took her virginity while she was drugged — an act, she is told by the other women, in which she should rejoice, because Patrick is such a great guy who purifies her.
If the film had dug a little deeper, we could easily have been disgusted at the underlying goings-on. At one point we realise Patrick has fathered only boys with the girls, and the question remains open what happened to the women who were pregnant with girls. But the film has its eye on other things, like the visual motif of the empty room in which Marcy May is consoled after losing her virginity, and the same empty room, later on, in which she tries to console, drugged drink in hand, a girl before she goes to meet Patrick one dark night. In this way, the full story is revealed from many different angles while being visibly, securely grounded and connected by the visuals.
This is the first film of director Sean Durkin, and he treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, with the exception of one particularly grating outburst of Marcy May during some celebration at Lucy and Ted’s, when the dramatic music takes over the scene completely.
But Marcy May’s past haunts her less than it haunts her sister, who is the real victim here. Having worried for years about her, she now wants to patch things up, but Marcy May won’t let her. Instead, although she is already imposing on her by staying comfortably at her house, she also makes some rude comments about her to Ted and laughs out loud when he tells her they are trying to have a baby.
“If you’re going to live here, you need to be a part of things,” are words of wisdom Patrick had told her that she could have kept in mind, but her lifeless eyes reveal her as being lost and confused. Yet it is frustrating to see Lucy also being too afraid to ask her why she is the way she is, and what had happened to her during all that time they didn’t see each other.
Viewers will talk about the ending, and it is one that isn’t entirely clear. Little of substance happens, but that is a general observation about the film itself, whose events can be read as an ineluctable journey towards tragedy, or merely small coincidences that Marcy May hysterically, but not without reason, interprets out of proportion.
It is possible she is merely hallucinating everything from before she arrived at Lucy’s place, though such an interpretation is itself perhaps a little far-fetched. The many L-cuts (sound that starts in one shot but is actually connected to the shot that starts, in a different time and place, a few seconds later) suggest this might be the case, but you can judge for yourself.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is a very competently directed, but not entirely solid story that is nonetheless a powerful, memorable film.