52 Films by Women Vol 8. 44. The Outrun (Director: Nora Fingscheidt)
The Outrun is a one-woman piece of performance art.
Sometimes Ronan is acting. Sometimes play acting, looking out the window as if
she were steering a ship, the camera tilting to convey choppy waters, later
waving her hands as if controlling the waves. Sometimes delivering a lamb for
real. She is entirely unguarded. When Rona asks some young farmers to
participate in a scheme to look out for corncraigs, an endangered species of
bird, it is as if Ronan were appearing in a documentary. Many of the supporting
cast appear to be non-actors. Their naturalism rubs off on Ronan, who has
played a wide variety of roles, from Mary Queen of Scots to a teenage assassin,
but here is raw and isolated.
The film is really
about the cure rather than the disease. Drawing, a cold dip in the sea – and
flinching, here again, Ronan doesn’t appear to be acting – soft drinks and
watching an arts festival wearing a pair of spectacle frames decorated with
wooden sticks that resemble the rays of the sun, albeit not painted yellow.
Rona doesn’t connect with people so much as herself. At periodic points, she
narrates, telling us about selkies and the perilous height of waves. The
voiceover is disassociated from her character.
Yet Rona had a lover,
Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), a job (she is late in completing tasks) and a friend
(Izuka Hoyle). She keeps one out of three. Daynin can’t stop her drinking,
witnesses her self-harm, and has had enough. Rona comes home to find all his
possessions gone. She throws something against the wall. The film is full of
juxtapositions, tranquillity and violence. Rona stands outside a door, begging
for forgiveness. We see her in her bubble, which frequently bursts.
The film makes the
point that alcoholism is a solo venture. Although alcohol is said to make an
individual more confident in company, it is a distancing device, making you
less like yourself, indeed making you like yourself less. Fingscheidt and Ronan
capture this well. It is almost their only point, made repeatedly.
An alcoholic will
not know better. An alcoholic will hurt your feelings. An alcoholic’s self-
awareness is displaced by their addiction. One heartbreaking scene sums this
up. Daynin collects Rona from hospital after a night on the town went terribly
wrong. She has a bruise around her eye, as if elbowed harshly. They chat about
his new life. She glimpses at a pub in the distance. ‘Wanna go for a drink?’
she asks. Daynin is horrified.
Pictured: Rona (Saoirse Ronan) and Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) in a scene from 'The Outrun', a British-German co-production directed by Nora Fingscheidt and adapted from Amy Liptrot's memoir by Fingscheidt and Liptrot. Still courtesy of Studio Canal (UK)
We have no idea if Rona,
whose name is both an anagram of the director’s forename and a shortened
version of Ronan’s surname, decided on her own form of treatment. ‘I’ve come
[to Orkney] to help my dad on his farm,’ she explains. Rona’s father, living in
a caravan, is a roaring stream-of-conscious drunk, a man whose bottle in a
spinning game always pointed at himself. They have a zoom call – he calls her.
He’s a beehive shorn of honey. It is as if he has reached a breakthrough on the
farm but conveys a sense of not-so-grand delusion. There is a complementary scene
in which Rona explains her enthusiasm for seaweed and, even though she hasn’t
consumed alcohol in days, she sounds drunk and exactly like her father. ‘If
only more people could get on board the seaweed train,’ she explains, ‘it could
save the world.’ Her mother is both perplexed and deeply worried. Alcoholics
are deeply unconvincing.
Yet Rona has a
point. Nature provides the means to detoxify ourselves and repair chemical
imbalances. Yet you wonder why Rona just didn’t take up exercise, creating her
own endorphin rush, rather than travel to a remote island.
We have no idea how
Rona affords the cottage that she stays in that becomes her one-woman wellness
clinic, a retreat without staff, where (intentionally) there is not much ‘going
on’. As she is shown round a spacious, solid but nevertheless vulnerable
structure, in particular her single bed which is a mattress on a shelf akin to
what one might find on board a ship or a convent, we shudder. Rona appears to
her taken her hair styling from Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is dyed aquamarine blue. In the course of
her recovery, it grows out. Rona dyes her hair orange. The latter is a mark of
progress.
Pictured: Caravan man. Rona's father (Stephen Dillane) in a scene from the Anglo-German alcoholism drama, 'The Outrun', directed by Nora Fingscheidt, who wrote the screenplay with author Amy Liptrot. Still courtesy of Studio Canal (UK)
Suspense is
generated periodically by the possibility that Rona, in her isolation, might
relapse. She left her father’s farm to live on a smaller island, ostensibly
working on a nature conservation project. She gives herself purpose but never
talks about it. The purpose could allow her to join a community, to agree with
other people, to connect. When we see Rona with others, she is smiling,
observing, not always contributing.
Does Ronan connect
with the audience? Not entirely. The road to sobriety is lonely but doesn’t
always inspire pity. At one point, Rona is told that living without alcohol
doesn’t get easy. It gets ‘less hard’ but remains difficult. This is no gonna
cheer ye up of a Saturday night. In her voiceover, Rona describes Orkney as an
island off the coast of Scotland, Papay is off the coast of Orkney, another
island off the coast of Papay. She is wandering inside the nest egg of
solitude. Her mother comes to visit and is faintly appalled. She has come to
terms with her life. ‘I found God – well, he found me,’ she trills. Her face
betrays her emotions, but quite honestly she doesn’t have anything better to
offer Rona. For her part, Rona does ask her about herself. ‘Was it hard?’ Her
mother’s face tells a story.
Rona tries to
connect with a young man outside a Post Office. He flees from her, making an
excuse. Towards the end, Rona plays footsie with another boy by way of
foreplay. By that time she seems altogether less scary.
The back-and-forth
structure leads to a sobering moment, when Rona falls down on the pebble beach
and recalls entering a stranger’s car while drunk, phoning a friend, then escaping
an attempted sexual assault. Fingscheidt stages this in dimly lit jump cuts,
bringing the physicality of the assault to life, but without any
objectification. The car driver flees the scene. Choosing to live in Orkney
isn’t just a retreat but a form of protection from predatory men to a point
where she can learn to trust. This observation is so lightly made that you
almost don’t register it.
Fingscheidt doesn’t
make a bigger point about why women choose to get drunk. For men, it is about
bravado (how much you can handle), gaining confidence, having a social focus
which soon becomes an anti-social one. Dutch courage refers to the make of beer
you consume. Beer is marketed as a fortifier, not a relaxant. Do women view
alcohol the same way? Forever subject to the male gaze, does alcohol help women
to ignore it? The film doesn’t gender its subject.
The title suggests a
competition, an individual trying to outpace their desire for alcohol. There is
the suggestion that Rona, with headphones on listening to techno music (a
corrective to ADHD, perhaps) is triumphant. The last sound we hear occurs when
Rona spots a rare bird in the street, just at the point when she is no longer
looking. She shrieks, the film’s first expression of sober joy.
Reviewed at Screen One, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, Friday 27 September 2024, 16:35 screening
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