Reviews Round-up: Where You're Meant to Be, Long Way North, The Violators

Where You’re Meant To Be (15)

★★★★☆

Dir: Paul Fegan, 76 mins, featuring: Aidan Moffat, Sheila Stewart

“I just wanted to take old songs from Scotland that made me giggle,” is how Aidan Moffat explains his decision to perform folk music at remote venues in front of sometimes sceptical audiences. This documentary follows him on a tour that takes him from the Isle of Lewis to Glasgow.

At first, it seems that he is attempting something similar to what American artist and filmmaker Harry Smith tried to in his Anthology of American Folk Music, preserving songs that might otherwise have died out. Moffat (one of the founders of indie rock band Arab Strap) is a naturally subversive figure with an ironic sense of humour whose attitude toward the folk music he himself is singing is often ambivalent. “These fucking songs go on and on,” he grumbles at one stage. “Folk music needs a good editor.”

The film is lent an unexpected poignancy by Moffat’s encounter with the celebrated Scottish folk singer, Sheila Stewart (who died not long after the documentary was completed). Stewart, who comes from the travelling community, is a proud and fiery figure who isn’t shy about telling him that he has completely misunderstood the songs he has tried to modernise.

“My ship lies in harbour, she’s ready to sail” isn’t, as he sees it, a nautical ditty but is about someone preparing for death. He prefers the songs that deal more obvious with drinking (“I’m a rover, seldom sober’) and sex. Director Fegan has an eye for evocative shots of Scottish landscapes. He also shares Moffat’s sense of mischief and his eye for a comic image, whether of a dog in a telephone box (kept there to stop it running on the road) or a fibreglass model of the Loch Ness monster.

Moffat’s own performances of the old songs are spirited and funny but, at the final concert in Barrowland in Glasgow, Sheila Stewart sings them in an incomparably richer and more moving fashion.

Long Way North (PG)

★★★☆☆

Rémi Chayé, 84 mins, voiced by: Christa Théret, Féodor Atkine, Antony Hickling

The aesthetic approach of this French animated feature is utterly different to that found in Disney or Pixar films. It is hand drawn and far less detailed and frenetic. There is no anthropomorphism or whimsy either. The animals here (in particular, a ferocious polar bear) aren’t remotely cuddly. Chayé’s pictorial style is akin to that in an illustrated kids’ adventure book.

His heroine is Sacha, a teenage aristocrat in 19th century St Petersburg who, armed with old maps, joins an epic voyage to the North Pole to vindicate her beloved grandfather (who went missing on an expedition of his own). The voice work here is bland and irritating, faces aren't expressive in the slightest but that doesn’t distract from what is a rousing and surprisingly brutal piece of storytelling.

The filmmakers are dealing with hunger, cowardice and with Sacha’s desperate yearning to prove her own courage and restore the reputation of her grandfather in the process. A little dark in its themes for younger audiences, the film still makes gripping viewing.


The Violators (15)

★★★☆☆

Helen Walsh, 99 mins, starring: Lauren McQueen, Brogan Ellis, Stephen Lord

Novelist Walsh’s debut feature has a very striking central performance and several powerful scenes that rekindle memories both of Alan Clarke’s work and of some of Andrea Arnold’s films. The hitch is that the storyline is strangely melodramatic and that Walsh’s in-your-face gritty realist approach is undermined by too many improbabilities and coincidences.

Newcomer Lauren McQueen brings intensity, vulnerability and an unlikely, febrile glamour to her role as Shelly, the teenage heroine living in poverty with her ne’er-do-well older step-brother, who is in debt to the loan sharks, and her younger step-brother, whom she is desperate to protect.

They’re all in terror of their abusive father, who is in prison but may be released soon. She draws closer and closer to a charismatic and inscrutable pawnbroker, Mikey Finnegan. He’s obsessed with her. So is Rachel (Brogan Ellis), a well-educated, middle-class girl. As the two girls' lives collide, the plotting becomes increasingly contrived and the final reel revelations don’t ring true.