Edinburgh International Film Festival

Helen, a film by directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, is an excellent new British film. It is the story of a girl named Helen who helps the police in a reconstruction of the disappearance of a fellow student named Joy. The two, according to the police, look alike and have the same features. However, as the film progresses, we learn that Helen has a life completely different from Joy’s. Joy is popular, plays music in a band, has two loving parents who miss her greatly. Helen, on the other hand, works in a hotel as a maid, doesn’t have many friends, doesn’t have a favorite type of music, and was a foster child living in a home for most of her life. As the film progresses, Helen begins to adopt various aspects of Joy’s life, and talks to her, in soliloquy, as she walks through the woods where Joy disappeared. She meets and possibly falls in love with Joy’s boyfriend, and has dinner with Joy’s parents. She has to confront her own past and reconcile it with Joy’s, as she tries to understand what has led them into such different paths. At the end of the movie, in an extremely poignant scene, Helen finds out her true past, and understands that she can not take on the life of someone else, but instead must live her own life.
Helen is an amazing film. However, its intention is not to entertain, and if the audience expects entertainment, they will go away extremely unhappy. Helen, instead, is an exploration of what makes a person who they are, and how two people who on the surface look alike, can have two totally different lives and personalities. Helen is a tragic figure, seemingly lost by the system that raised her. However, she is the perfect person for a study of this kind, because she is, basically, a blank slate. She doesn’t seem to have a personality. She is without a history, and without opinions. She is, at first glance, ambivalence incarnate. However, as she develops throughout the film, she creates her life for herself. She realizes something is missing, wishes to change it, but in the end adopts her own meaning to life and reconciles her history to the history she wishes to have for herself. She accepts her fate, despite her loathing of it, and continues on with life. It is an extremely existential film. Her final words “I’d like to stop now” echo with meaning, in that she has decided that her life is her own, not someone else’s, and will now begin living it herself. I loved this film, and give it a ranking of four and a half stars.