"Gideon's Daughter"

I'm not sure why I was looking up information on Emily Blunt, but somewhere along the way, I read that Emily sang on her boyfriend's (Michael Buble) latest album, and that she'd also sung on a film called "Gideon's Daughter,". So I went to Youtube and hunted for "Natasha's Song" and even though I knew nothing about the film, I felt drawn by Emily's voice, the haunting melody, the way some pain inside her is kept fiercely in check even as she breathes life into each compelling line of the song. Is she telling her own story? Is she speaking of her own father? Is she speaking to her father? While the sleepy-eyed girl sings, her gaze is steady, perhaps laying heavily on her father in the audience. When the song ends, and the applause begins, she breaks into a smile, just a schoolgirl pleased with what she's accomplished; but then, just before she turns away, for an instant, she glares stonily at someone.

Thankfully, some kind soul put the entire film there, and I got to watching it right away. It turns out that the song leads her father to desperately wonder how he can reconcile with her before she leaves him, possibly forever. Bill Nighy turns in a beautifully nuanced performance. He is Gideon Warner, a successful man in the PR line, but so flawed in many other ways. His life revolves around his work or the female celebrities who cling to him. He hasn't been a good man, but you feel for his character. Right in those moments when his need for change, his desire to connect to another human being is so palpable.

Just as he begins to reach towards his daughter, another person unexpectedly enters his life. Miranda Richardson's Stella comes from a world very different from Gideon's, though they did grow up in the same area. She looks like a hippie, wears her hair bright red, and works in a 24-hour shop to escape her grief of losing her five-year-old son. Together, these two parents learn to cope with their pain and loss, and Stella slowly guides Gideon towards a different kind of life.

It's a quiet movie, filled with quiet moments, pauses, images, expressions. But each one is weighty with emotion and significance. The music - in particular Natasha's song and the famous Thomas Tallis 40-part motet, "Spem In Alium" - also does an important job of pushing the story ahead, affecting the characters and revealing much of their emotional landscapes.

One of the loveliest things about the film is its ethereal quality, created by the narrative device itself. The film is framed by scenes of the storyteller, one of Gideon's friends, who is narrating it to a young woman. He tells it almost as if it were a fable, and yet, he did meet all of the characters of his story. Knew them, saw them. It's a fable that he watched unfold as it was being written. Written in a time we all lived in: in 1997, when New Labour rose to power and Princess Diana died, an event that seemed unbelievable when it happened. That real-life magic continues in one scene where the figures of three people vanish from a street in Edinburgh; they've been magicked away into a part of the story that can't be told to us because the storyteller doesn't know it himself. That part certainly resembles real life, the way we can never know what happens to some of the people who crossed our paths a long time ago.

Posted by Monoceros at July 4, 2007 12:18 AM