States of Ultimate Concern

     One of the most distinctive features of Ramsay's films is their emphasis on ritual and ceremonies, particularly those associated with burial. In these sequences, motifs suggestive of psychic disruption and even literal or potential violence are reconfigured and transformed. Water, frequently associated (Eucharistically) with blood, here takes on a cleansing and regenerative power. In our interview, Ramsay mentions going to see Salvador Dalí's Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951) at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow daily and her imaginative universe is clearly religious, less in a doctrinally specific sense (she is the child of a Catholic father and a mother from a strictly Protestant background) than in what Paul Tillich called "the state of being ultimately concerned"[1].
     As in the films of Robert Bresson and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other side of redemption lies the possibility of suicide. In "The Myth of Suicide" (1953), Albert Camus declared that it was the only "really serious philosophical problem" [2]. Bresson's films are sometimes misunderstood on this point. As with Dostoevsky, he brings his characters to the brink, but invariably leaves open the possibility of a decisive and transformative reversal (the pause just before the end of The Devil Probably, 1977, is emblematic).
     The ending of Bresson's Mouchette, a film that has exerted a great influence on Ramsay, would seem to be the bleakest possible. However, Bresson goes out of his way to show the young girl rolling three times before she enters the water, breaks his own proscription of nondiegetic music by inserting Claudio Monteverdi's Magnificat (1610) on the soundtrack, and even appears to have reversed the film to make the water into which Mouchette has just fallen flow backwards. It is extremely difficult for an attentive viewer to interpret Mouchette's actions as a suicide.
     In the sequence from You Were Never Really Here (2017) below, Ramsay makes the gestures of reversal and affirmation more explicit, although she then adds her own layers of complex irony by placing the sequence before the film's most cataclysmic violence (suggesting, as in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, 1976, that the protagonist's goal has shifted from self-destruction to crusade).
     The eponymous Morvern Callar's transformation is, by contrast, seen only from the outside. Visiting Spain with her friend, she seems to have been renewed by an encounter with a communal procession she cannot quite understand but is drawn into, much like the central couple in Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1953). Rossellini presents this as en epiphanic encounter. Tellingly, in Morvern Callar, it precedes a second figurative burial , bringing a sort of closure to the film (which opened with her husband's suicide). As in the great Romantic novels, the return home is no less and no more than a new beginning.