Narrative Structure
About a Girl follows a young girl growing up in Manchester who tells us about her life in a mockumentary style section which is interspersed with actual moments from her life. Her flippant and rude attitude starts of a little annoying but quickly becomes saddening as we begin to realise the gravity of the situation she is in while she doesn’t. The girl is more concerned about what ice cream she wants rather than the dead baby she has jus thrown into the river in a plastic bag.
The narrative structure of About a Girl is split into two main sections: a mockumentary style section where she explains her life to the camera, and a section that shows us moments from her life relating to what she is talking about. The mockumentary bits feel very impersonal as the Girl explains her life in a very casual and uncaring way, rambling on and on in her thick accent about her mum and her dad and her friends. The real sections are much more personal, showing her life for what it really is rather than how she tells it to people. Normally, a documentary/interview is supposed to show who someone really is and paint a picture of their worldview and their life, but here it does the opposite while the random scenes from her life demonstrate much more about who she truly is and what is actually important about the story. In this sense, I though having the story split up in this way was very very effective and made me think about how the social culture in Britain makes it so hard to spot who is okay and who is going through something terrible. We ask eachother ‘you alright?’ All the time and yet the answer is never sincere. Just ‘yeah you?’
I think there’s also something quite profound about where the film starts and where it ends. We open seeing a young girl practicing her dance moves in a field with all of the joy and innocence in the world. We close with the hopeless and gutting reality of a young girl born into the depressing reality of post-industrial England. In some ways, the girl herself can be thought of as the baby being thrown into the river. She was born, and immediately robbed of her innocence by her parents who threw her straight into the rivers of abuse, violence and poverty.
Cinematic Influences
Not to gatekeep the film, but About a Girl is a film that really requires that the viewer be British to truly understand it. The film to me is reminiscent of works like This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) and Skins (Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, 2007-2013). They all capture the bleak and depressing feel of post-industrial Britain.
About a Girl features all of the hallmarks of films set in this depressing era of Britain: thick accents, long roads of dull council housing, grey, discouraging weather and so much more. These are things that can only be truly interpreted by someone who lives in the country and has experienced towns that look like this. Setting the film in Manchester in particular is interesting as Manchester is known as the world’s first industrial city. And when the modern era hit Manchester, along with other places like Sheffield and Birmingham, it was one of the British cities hit hardest by financial turmoil.
One particular use of cinematography that I noticed was the shaky and unsteady handheld camera used throughout the film. The use of shakycam makes the film feel much more grounded in reality and also represents the uncertainty of the Girl’s life as we move towards the climax. In face, one of the only times the camera is steady is right at the beginning. The much steadier camera at the start reinforces the innocence and joy of childhood and how everything is just okay. The world stays still and the most important thing is dancing in the fields to Britney Spears.
Throughout the film, the weather is consistently grey which is sort of amplified by the dull colour grading Percival uses. The grey colour grading represents the lifelessness and dullness of the life lead by the girl. It makes things feel even more bleak and give you a sense of dread and sickness in your heart as you slowly realise that the girl doesn’t even seem to fully grasp how sad her situation is.
One shot in particular that stood out to me is when the girl is sat outside the pub with her coke and bag of crisps. She tries to use music to escape the loneliness but it’s clear that in this moment she is unhappy and realises that it isn’t normal or okay for her dad to leave her alone like this. But instead of facing the reality, she decides to continue to exist in the charade of a normal childhood with her coke, crisps and music.
I’m not sure if the copy of the film I watched was just not very good, but it seemed to me that the film was filmed using budget camera equipment. While this limitation is most likely the result of the presumably low budget of the film, we may be able to tease out a little more meaning than that. The obvious meaning here would be that the low budget camera equipment could perhaps highlight the deep poverty shown in the film- but there may be something more to it. Perhaps the slightly fuzzy picture in the film could help to make the whole thing sort of feel like a memory. Perhaps we are looking back on the girls childhood, and realising things weren’t fine. Looking at it through a more mature lens changes how we view all of the events in the film. It’s maybe a little bit of a reach but this is an effect that the film had on me, and I think that it could bean interesting technique to use even if it wasn’t on purpose here.
Creating Meaning and Effect
In the film, the director is trying to portray the deep poverty which exists in many UK cities. A few ways it did this was through the outfits of the characters, the environments they exist in and the way they talk. The most apparent of these is the Mancunian accent of the main girl and the surrounding characters. To most, the thick accent will link the girl to poverty and will make the girl seem ‘common’. Again though, the accent is simply a product of the girls environment and adds to the theme that you are only as good as your surroundings. The outfits worn by the character are cheap looking which also adds to the sense of poverty. The sets are all genuine council estates and local pubs which makes the film feel more visceral and invokes a very specific feeling in any Brit who has lived in or been through one of these areas.
Having the main character be a young woman makes her feel a little more vulnerable and impressionable. This aids the themes of the film about how young people are moulded by their surroundings. You could not tell this story as well with an 80 year old woman or a 34 year old man it just wouldn’t be the same.
In the film, the parents are noticeable absent. They are seen in a couple of shots but are never really the focus of the frame, they’re always off to the side or slightly off camera or turned away from it. This is representative of how the parents are in the girls life. They are absent, uncaring and always seemingly worried about other things (football, cigarettes and the pub for example).
When I first heard the films title, about a girl, I was a little unsure as to what the film would be about as this was a fairly vague title that could really be about anyone. And when I finished the film I understood exactly why the director chose this. About a Girl could be about anyone or anything and that was the point, anyone could be this young girl who has found herself in this life of poverty and abuse. Anyone could be that baby in the plastic bag at the end. This is a story about how someone’s environment shapes them in ways they can’t control and the title absolutely reflects this and adds just that extra layer of complexity to the whole thing.
I really liked this one- it was genuine and emotive and the twist at the end felt jarring, but well built up to and subtle in its true meaning. The baby being thrown into the river could have easily been played simply for shock value, but I think the 7 or so minutes which built up to it meant it was a very good pay off to what the film had been building over its runtime. About a Girl will surely inspire what I do with my short film, and also inspire much different thoughts and feelings the next time I walk through somewhere reminiscent of the council estates of Manchester.