Shots in the dark: what happens when women run away?

Watching the party chicks played by Samantha Morton and Kathleen McDermott traipsing along a dusty track in rural Spain in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar reminded me less of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon driving though the southern wastes in Thelma & Louise (1991) than John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter going round and round in circles in the same terrain in The Searchers (1956).

"What makes a man to wander? / What makes a man to roam?" goes the theme song of that John Ford Western, in which Wayne and Hunter search for Wayne's niece for some seven years before finding her among the Comanches who abducted her as a child. After he has brought her home, Wayne turns away into the desert as a door closes on him. His quest is internal and it cannot end. So it is with all the cinema's great wanderers, among them Alan Ladd in Shane (1953), Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The Passenger (1975), Rudiger Vogler in Alice in the Cities (1974), and Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (1984). So it is with Morvern in Morvern Callar.

What, though, makes a woman to wander? What makes a woman to roam? As aberrant a figure in the movies as she is in society, the itinerant female lacks the iconic resonance of her male counterpart because her physical vulner ability, her rejection of the nesting instinct and her probable promiscuity are taboo. Aside from the two hitchhikers in Messidor (1978), the motorcyclist in Shame (1988) and Elodie Bouchez in The Dreamlife of Angels (1998), women drifters in the cinema are invariably neurotics. Shirley Knight in The Rain People (1969), Barbara Loden in Wanda (1971), and Thelma and Louise may liberate themselves, but they run out of places to run to; by the time the globetrotting Solveig Dommartin makes it to outer space in Until the End of the World (1991), we have lost interest in her. Cast adrift in the Australian outback in Walkabout (1971), Jenny Agutter's schoolgirl survives to become a bourgeois housewife.

Diverging from Alan Warner's source novel and road movie conventions, Morvern Callar centers on a young woman neither bright nor streetwise, but who is endowed with an almost unconscious self-sufficiency--and, who, like Wayne's Ethan Edwards, cannot belong. When we meet Morvern, a superstore worker portrayed with haunting off-kilter virtuosity by Morton, she has just found the body of her writer boyfriend--a Christmas suicide--in their flat. Grooving to the sounds on her omnipresent Walkman, she subsequently dismembers the corpse in the bathtub, buries the remains in the hills, and uses his cash to whisk herself and her pal Lanna (McDermott) to the British rave scene on Spain's Mediterranean coast..And why not?

Mesmerizingly strange, like a Sergio Leone movie co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Irvine Welsh, Morvern Callar is suffused with elliptical impressionism, as was Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999). Though there are dabs of Celtic mysticism and even expressionism, there are also Tarkovskian images of decay--worms, beetles and ants writhe in the primordial muck, intimating mortality,

Morvern doesn't lack a moral compass, as some observers have suggested, but devises her own morality as she proceeds, resourcefully using her tragedy to escape her prescribed life in a Scottish port town. Her disposal of her boyfriend and her replacing his name with her own on the title page of his novel (which nets her a hundred thousand pounds) come across not as amoral acts, but acts of faith as devout as her visit to a Spanish graveyard; in contrast, the feckless Lanna's admission that she slept with Morvern's man is as treacherous as the betrayal itself.

After a Toronto Film Festival screening of Morvern Caller in September, Ramsay suggested Warner's book is more existential than her movie. Yet whereas Warner finally brings Morvern back home, with a child in her tummy--"The child of the raves"--Ramsay lets her drift on, her future uncertain. This is a uniquely unearthly transgressor. Slipping away from a raucous party a few hours after her grisly discovery, Morvern lifts her dress above her waist so a fishing boat pilot can see the play of her black lingerie on her pale body-momentarily, inexplicably, she becomes a sex phantom.

And it's the same motherless Morvern we see making soup for Lanna's ancient grandma shortly afterward, silently contemplating her with the kindliest smile. Again, why not? In Ramsay's world of shimmering ambivalences, where dreams of leaving predominate, a girl who saws up her boyfriend, steals his novel and embarks on a perpetual journey into sybaritism may seem like the most sane and tender person you could know.

Graham Fuller Is Interview's Film Writer at Large.

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