Helen is intriguing, hypnotic, enigmatic and eerily atmospheric. I haven’t seen a film that is saturated with so much colour. It was mesmerising. The film opens with Joy, a teenager, who parts company with her friends in the park while she walks along, the language is minimal though there’s music in the background. We witness Joy walking silently through the park, the symbolic vibrant yellow biker jacket contrasts with the autumnal browns, oranges and greens of the park, we see overheadshots of Joy, close-ups as well as she walks towards her destination.
What is striking is how mundane and ordinary Joy’s walk, the rest of the film deals with the consequences and extraordinary events of that walk. Joy, is seemingly abducted, though details are sparse. We witness the police engaged in a finger tip search of the park. Joy’s bag, along it its contents are scattered in the woods. Her accessories are photographed and examined in a clinical manner by the police. They decide to hold a reconstruction so they ask students at the college Joy attended whether any of them will participate. Helen is chosen to reenact Joy’s final known moments in the park. The police have little information about why she entered the woods except she, ‘wanted time alone’. As I said before the script is sparse and minimal, it was refreshing not to get the usual police procedural/formulaic investigation, building profiles and such. It is not a film about the missing teenager, Joy but about Helen.
Joy builds a rapport with one of the investigate officers who displays a sense of optimism. When she is speaking to Joy’s classmates she emphasises that bad things happen in the world but that people are essentially good. The same with the careers teacher who espouses the need for students to follow their dreams, indulge in blue sky thinking. The social workers attached to Helen (she has been brought up in the care system) are overwhelmingly warm and optimistic. Throughout the film there’s this shared collective optimism displayed by all the authority figures, which kinda jars with reality.
Helen’s life is polar opposite to Joy’s. Helen’s ‘blue sky thinking, is a desperation for a home of her own, it may feel unfamiliar but at least it is hers while her other classmates dream of owning chains of shops or to produce a spectacular piece of music that resonates with people. Helen isn’t so ambitious.
During the time she spends reconstructing Joy’s final known moments, she ingratiates herself in Joy’s family and meets Joy’s boyfriend. Helen ‘speaks’ to Joy in a voice over while she wanders in the woods wearing that distinctive yellow leather jacket. There’s a scene where Helen lies down in the wood, it conjured up a Pre-Raphaeliteimage for me especially Helen’s striking long brown hair with auburn hues (again, she admits to styling her hair like Joy’s).
The film has a jarring synth music background, which is unnerving and entrancing. What the film makes up for lack of constructive narrative and storyline, it is essentially a pared down script, is an emphasis on the other senses such as smell, noise and the visual. There’s a scene where Joy’s mum is allowed to touch Joy’s jacket, and there’s a loud crackle as she pulls it out of the evidence bag and pulls it to her face where she inhales deeply. Scenes where the camera lingers on the facial expressions of the characters while the importance of dialogue is subordinated.
The cinematography is breathtakingly beautiful. But the film, at subterranean levels, is creepy and unnerving made more so by the music. The emphasis is on the fear of the unknown. There is a druggie feel to the film, dream like as well. Little things such as Helen’s yellow jacket is in every scene and when she is in the woods there’s something startlingly similar to Little Red Riding Hood but resplendent in yellow.
Her desperation to re-invent herself and moulding herself, (un)consciously into a clone of Joy. Becoming someone she is comfortable with, yet confronting her own past, to be able to have a ‘house with carpets’, to have the things she has never had. And that is one strand of the film, being someone else (Helen’s Estonian workmate, Maria, has a desperation to severe all ties and re-invent herself) and the same could be applied to Joy?
It’s a short film, just over 1 hour, yet captivating, unnerving yet genuinely intriguing. I kept thinking of the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, different style, period, content and narrative but the cinematography had similarities and the music, pan pipes, was used for dramatic purposes to add tension to the storyline against a backdrop of the Australian outback, similar to the story’s relationship to the landscape in Helen. It conjures up a dream like state, a dream within a dream, both surreal and unreal.
