Carol Morley follows up the stunning documentary Dreams Of A Life with this drama about a fainting epidemic in a girls’ school in 1969. Stylish but the allegory for female oppression – and that’s allegory in giant neon lights with sparks and trumpets and stuff – overwhelms the story somewhat.
Sixteen-year-old schoolgirls Abby (Pugh) and Lydia (Williams) have the kind of bond that shares chewing gum and carves names into trees. When Abby falls pregnant, suffers from fainting fits and dies, the fainting episodes begin to affect Lydia. Soon the student body is swooning during class. Doctors are called in to run tests but the stern headmistress (Monica Dolan) believes the girls are faking it. Meanwhile, Maisie’s relationship with her agoraphobic, emotionally distant mother (Peake) comes to a head…
The Falling is a film that demands to be studied, for scenes to be deconstructed and dialogue to be pored over. You can see it taught in classes, the teacher illustrating how everything means something else. It’s about emancipation, about refusing to be tied to preconceived notions of gender, and how the ‘system’ keeps women down. Abby is admonished by a teacher (Scacchi). Lydia tells a psychologist that she resents the notion that she is ‘emotional’ and what she is feeling is real while the faculty are adamant that ‘standards of behaviour must be kept.’
Morley is deliberately ambiguous as to the nature and reasons of this epidemic - Does it all stem from Lydia’s unconscious jealousy of Abby (Abby sleeps with Lydia’s brother whom she harbours sexual feelings for), and what’s all this about witchcraft? – but by the third act, the writer-director gives up on the indirect approach and the film descends into melodrama. By the end Lydia is screaming about the system keeping her down. The Falling never quite manages to come out from under its allegorical overtones and become a story in its own right: every line, every action, every scene so strongly addresses this theme that it renders the characters unbelievable.
But Morley’s distinctive style and Williams’ spikey performance save the day. Morley lends the unspecified location an otherworldly, dreamy atmosphere: Lydia walks down the hall in slow motion and gently blows in Abby’s ear; oddly, no one reacts to Abby’s fainting in the canteen; and the scenes are short, as if they’re snatches of moments. Williams brings that Ayra Stark defiance to Lydia. With her twitchy right eye, there’s an ocean of emotions suppressed just below the surface that could spring forth at any moment.
