52 Films by Women Vol 8. 5. Holly (Director: Fien Troch)
If you are an outsider, you will almost certainly attract
excessive hostility. This is the experience of Holly (Cathalina Geeraerts) the titular heroine of Belgian
director Fien Troch’s film, Holly, a drama about projection,
self- belief and as the song at the end pronounces, none too subtly, the power
of love.
When we first meet Holly, she is walking with her
neighbourhood friend, Bart (Felix Heremans), and Bart’s dog, Mito in a local
park. Troch films them from a low angle so they are placed out of reach, as it
were, from other people. The camera lens also catches the sun, the light
obscuring them. In visual terms, this makes them hard to look at. Mito noses
his way into a picnic, annoying a group of teenagers, who want the pair to take
the dog away. ‘Shouldn’t the dog have a lead?’ one of them asks. Holly and Bart
oblige. In school, Holly leans against a wall. Teenagers comment on her smell
as they pass. She is shunned. A teacher puts it more succinctly. ‘Are you aware
they call you a witch?’ ‘No,’ replies Holly. But she’s very aware.
‘What would it be like to live up there?’ Holly asks
pointing to a building as she walks with Bart through the park. ‘I’m sure the
view is beautiful.’ However, this is a Belgian film. The light is grey. Misery
is pervasive. Holly lives with her mother and sister, whom we first see
watching television, with dull impassivity. They might just as well be watching
traffic lights change colour. Holly puts up with other girls touching her and
then announcing within her earshot, ‘I touched the witch.’ If it is a personal
hygiene issue, someone should tell her discretely.
Whatever she says about not being affected by what her peers
say, the opposite is true. One morning, she stays at home, telling the school
that her mother isn’t there and that she won’t come in. Looking out of the
window, she sees thick black smoke from behind a tree. Lots of it. We hear
sirens.
There was a fire at school. Ten children lost their lives.
We see photographs on a wall. Did Holly have a premonition?
Troch doesn’t answer the question, but it is clear that Holly
is perceived differently. A mother of one of the deceased girls watches a video
of Holly brushing her daughter’s arm as she walks behind her. She notices that
her daughter’s mood changes after Holly passes her, as if somehow transformed.
Does Holly have a gift for making people feel better about themselves?
A female teacher, Anna (Greet Verstraete)
proposes a trip to help the families of the children who died in the fire come
to terms with the tragedy. This involves a picnic in the countryside from a
high vantage point, where, as they say, the view is beautiful. The teacher
watches Holly with the parents. What she says changes their mood. This is in
sharp contrast to the coach journey to the countryside where a (male) parent
shifts uneasily in his seat as music is played – it is a little too elegiac. He
stands up and asks for the music to be changed. The teacher replaces it with an
upbeat pop song.
Holly is presented concurrently as subject and object. Troch
is by no means the first director to depict their female protagonist this way. In
one scene we might be able to guess what Holly is thinking, in other scenes,
for example when she is leaning against a wall, we have no clue. Her behaviour
tells us something, but not everything. She definitely has an effect on Bart,
who we see in an office knocking things over, picking up a piece of paper and
tearing it in two, unable or unwilling to stop being destructive. In Holly’s
company he is far less destructive. In one scene, he bursts into her apartment
with Mito in tow looking for her. Her mother is shocked. ‘Take the dog out. My
landlord says we can’t have pets in the building.’ ‘If you stress Mito out,
he’ll pee on the carpet,’ Bart tells her. Eventually, Bart leads Mito outside.
‘Now can I see Holly?’ he asks.
Still courtesy of CineartsBE (Belgium)
It isn’t long before a mother asks to see Holly with the
teacher accompanying her. The mother is distraught. ‘I had a dream about my
daughter,’ she tells Holly. ‘You were with her. In the dream, you told me that
my daughter is all right. Thank you for looking after her.’ Holly receives a
grateful hug, apparently the conduit between the dead girl and her mother. It
is the first hug of many.
Holly is asked to help out dispensing food to immigrant
families. A boy, later identified as Gabor, asks for her help. ‘Don’t worry, I
will help you,’ Holly replies, seemingly convinced of her gift.
Both Anna and her caretaker boyfriend are troubled. The
couple are trying for a child. Noting that she has reached a fertile peak, the
teacher invites her partner for sex. However, the teacher is not impregnated.
‘Why can all these bad mothers have children, yet I can’t?’ she explodes in
frustration. The caretaker is consumed by guilt. As he explains later, while
children were fleeing the fire, he did nothing, consumed by sadness. He should
have helped. The teacher persuades him to talk to Holly. Holly relieves him of
his guilt.
She becomes something of a local celebrity. In a Chinese
restaurant, the staff give her family free drinks. Holly’s mother (Els Deceukelier) is ecstatic. A waiter says that someone in the restaurant
wants to see her. Embarrassed and afraid, Holly doesn’t leave her seat. Her
mother encourages her, seduced by the attention. Holly is asked to stand on her
seat. She is greeted with applause but remains petrified. ‘Free desserts for
everyone,’ announces the waiter.
This does not mean that Holly is liked at school. She finds
that people give her money for her support. In an early scene, she trades in a
set of DVDs for five Euros. This isn’t enough for the spark orb that has caught
Bart’s eye. Later we see it in Bart’s apartment. With a twenty euro note, Holly
buys a necklace. She later has enough to buy new sneakers and a white padded
coat. However, it becomes clear that Holly doesn’t understand her gift. In one
scene, she skips school to look for people to help.
We know something bad will happen when Bart flees from a
group of boys and crosses a busy motorway. Holly runs after him. It is
fortunate that neither are hit by cars. Gabor, who finds Holly in the street,
telling her that she promised to help, is less lucky. Holly flees from him and
hides in a shop. Gabor hammers on the door. The storekeeper intervenes and
scares Gabor away. He runs into traffic
and is hot by a car. Thinking that she is gifted, Holly goes to the hospital to
help him, removing the child’s oxygen mask. The machine monitoring his vital
signs sounds a warning. There is a problem in Room 318. Holly flees.
In the film’s climax, Holly’s desperation to help leads her
to comfort a crying baby and an immigrant woman. A young man leads her away.
‘They’ll fleece you. Do you still have your phone?’ It isn’t long before he
leads her into a shopping centre, in a corner free from view of security
cameras. He shows her a knife. There is a point where in mid robbery, Holly
could run, but does not do so, as if the theft of her phone, bag, coat,
necklace, and shoes were a necessary part of the process, a means to free herself
of the temptations of her gift. The teacher, who also asked Holly for help,
gives her some validation. She looks at an ultrasound monitor with delight.
Bart comes to see Holly. She had told him that he’s the most
normal person she knows. In the film’s final scene, set to the song ‘The Power
of Love’, made famous by – yes – Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood
fame, Bart goes to the park, stands tall, a confident figure facing the four
bullies who teased him. Like Holly’s other beneficiaries, he is relieved of
anxiety.
Do we think Holly has a gift? Hardly. The hopes of others
are projected onto her. Perception is not reality. Prejudice isn’t validated. Holly
is a film that asks us to see the world differently, doing so, to quote another
song, with a little love in our hearts.
Reviewed at Stockholm International Film Festival, Sture
Screen One, Sunday 19 November 2023, 10:15am screening.
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