As mainstay of the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch spins poetic, kitchen-sink tales of bad sex and messy break-ups and hopeless romantics in search of true love. On God Help the Girl, his directing debut, he has fashioned his songs into a narrative daisy-chain and hung them around his heroine's neck. That it's pretty and fragile is surely half the point.
God Help the Girl is a dreamy Glasgow-set musical, crowded with mixtapes and thrift-shops and football in the park; a film as indebted to the work of Bill Forsyth as that of Jacques Demy. Emily Browning plays Eve, a suspiciously deodorised depressive who absconds from the hospital to pursue a singing career. Browning is beautiful and the film knows it too. Murdoch moons at her dark bob, hazel eyes and bare knees like a lust-struck schoolboy on the brink of bolting for the bathroom.
After attending a gig at the Barrowland, Eve befriends James (Olly Alexander), a gawky guitarist who loves her to bits. Some time later they acquire a third member in the form of Cassie (Hannah Murray), a well-spoken English girl with a half-decent singing voice. The three musketeers then borrow a canoe from the college and paddle up the canal, past the warehouses and the local youths who are always going to laugh at them. "We're definitely a band now," Cassie tells them happily, as they sit by the waterside. "This is what bands do."
God Help the Girl comes loose and easy, verging on the slipshod. It's warm and generous, verging on the sentimental; a film that crystallises the best and worst of Belle and Sebastian's songwriting skills. If you're a fan of Murdoch's whimsical, maundering music then no doubt you'll relish his whimsical, maundering picture. But I hope that even non-believers will acknowledge the film's utter sincerity. It may be indulgent, but it means what it says.
In the clubs and bedsits of Glasgow, the friends argue about music and start to map out their future. Eve is the talent but James plays the mentor; an awkward young man with strongly held views that seem to shake him to his roots. "No one ever cried at a Bowie song," he rages at one point, and this is true for me if not for others. And yet what were the odds? When these clowns finally do get their band up and running – when the strings kick in and the song takes flight – I inexplicably found myself welling up. So the film is obviously doing something right. It evidently possesses a small dab of magic, this maudlin lo-fi spellbinder that shuffles shyly over, sits itself down and then asks you to love it.
