About A Girl

Directed by Brian Percival, released in 2001 and received a BAFTA for Best Short Film that same year.  About a girl is a short film about a young adolescent from a working class background, dealing with the hardship of teenage and family life.

The titles - sum up what to expect from the short film.  They're presented in a way that makes it look like a text message still being typed in and the audience can hear the dial-tone sound effect.  It's the most dull sound-effect that anyone could hear because it's monotonous - like that of the life of people who spend their time confined to a computer/phone and we hear it so often.  The graphics tell us that the title is very literal in meaning, so it bears a lot in relation to the context of the film.  It tells us that the film is literally about a girl - we already have the stereotype that all girls text away on their phones, so we can therefore assume that this is about a girl.

After that, with just one fade and complete silence to make it eerie - it fades to a low-angle shot of a 13 year old girl, secludedly standing, shivering in a field.  We can only see a silhouette of her, but as the lighting is purely natural (low-key) , it's dawn and from her singing the Britney Spears tune 'Stronger' our verdict is that she's run away from home; she's trying to find peace in the meadows and has probably had enough of her family life.  We can tell that there's something wrong with her simply by the tremor in her voice.  Her body is shaking and not only does it show in her silhouette but it also reflects in her voice.  Her agile dancing shows that she's inspired by what she hears and that her enthusiasm lies in music.  It then cuts to a medium close-up of her in beige jumper, telling us that it's winter, hence the reason for her shivering.  Yet there must be another reason for the tremor in her voice other than the bitter temperature it seems to be - carbon dioxide vaporising as it leaves her mouth.  She talks rather quickly "If Jesus were alive today, right - he'd probably be a singer".  This confirms our initial thoughts on her passion for singing.  Another thing we can tell from this shot is that this film is a documentary-style film: it has a tracking shot of her walking towards us and she speaks to us.  It's like we see from her POV apart from the fact that it's not an over-the-shoulder shot.  Close-ups are used conjunctly with long-shots in order to contrast between the girl's opinion and what is 'really' going on.

The location of the park is so casual and the informality of her (Mancunian) accent makes us believe that we're walking with her and makes the film have a personal feel.  She has a strong Mancunian accent, confirming our suspicions about her class-background.  In the background is a pulverised factory - the location changes each time so as to keep our attention.  One thing we notice about the girl straight away is that she hardly looks at the camera when she talks and all she talks about is herself and her situation - self-obsessed? It would certainly seem so as she talks so hurriedly that it's like she's excited to share everything there is to know about her with the audience.  She speaks about the most trivial things such as who in her family bought what and how her parents reacted "dental floss - our Jamie got some of that the other week.  Threw it down the lav - forgot to pull the chain.  Me mum sees it n' she checks our Sammy for worms" this hints that she hasn't been taught about rudimentary manners that are required when speaking to people such as not talking about inappropriate things like that.  The way she speaks, using words together such as "me mum", "the lav", "yous lot", "its like hello", "bless!" and her annunciation, pronouncing "my" as "meh", "thanks" as "fanks", "anything" as "anehfeng" and "doesn't matter" as "dosen' ma'er" has us presume that she has a lack of education.

We see many wide shots of the locations of where she goes, adjunctly with medium close-ups of her walking, hurriedly like she has to go somewhere.  The close-ups of her are framed in a way so she fills up the frame, which makes her look physically large and material - even though she's a small girl, the composition of the shot plays tricks with our mind, so she looks like an adult.  This is how the director wants us to perceive her as: "I'm not a kid" (she says later on in the film) her character believes herself to be an adult, like the average 13 year old does.  She speaks lowly of her mother; her conflictive manner is highlighted when we see a cutaway of her walking through the council estate that she lives in with her mum, arguing about her little sister opening bags and later on, she wails "she never lets us have nothing!".

We come to realise that this short film is entirely from her point of view - even though there are no POV shots (the director wants us to be able to see her physical features rather than other peoples' physical features through her eyes because the main emphasis isn't on other people) narratively, no-one else gives their point of view.

Through cutaways, we get the idea that her perception of the world is perverse, for example, she lays a claim that her dad is "dead busy wiv work...well...looking for work actually" two shots later we see her dad playing football.  Another example is when she tells us that "and then he takes me to the pub afterwards and gets me a coke and a bag of crisps." we see a shot of her sitting down afterwards, making us think that she could be sitting next to someone - but as the camera zooms out to a wide-shot of her sitting outside the pub in the spitting rain and breeze, withdrawn from the lively activity we can hear which is reverberated through the walls - we realise that the girl feels reclusive; singing's the only thing she does to console her feelings and we can understand why she's so fond of her dad; absence makes the heart grow fonder.  She feels rejected by her dad and this is explained through the cutaways of her dad claiming that he can't take her in.  The cutaways are another extremely important part of the story because they tell us something that the little girl doesn't.

Although she's simple, we can tell that the girl isn't that susceptible to her dad's boastfulness:"He coulda' played for city........not!" - she watches him play football so she knows that her dad isn't a pro-star like he said he was.  She also doesn't believe her mum "Says shes not go' enough ta' save for a piano buh shes always go' enough for ciggis, does she think I'm soft or wah?" she wants to be looked up to as an adult and seen as 'hard'.

As the film progresses onwards, we see that she actually has a social life beyond her home as she recalls her friends' names "theres gonna be me Stacey Kelly P Kelly C and Mirah".  We then see a  medium shot of all of the sitting down at the back of the bus, singing in unison "I'm not that innocent"
the girl jokes "no I'm not" we laugh at this because of her timely insert of that comment - the fact of the matter is though, as we are enlightened later on: this gives the film a dark undertone.

It cuts to and fro as the girl talks about her social life and "dance moves" on the bus.  She says "and I look after meh image - well important!" at this point we see her in a department store picking up a bottle of perfume, spraying it on her hands and smelling it.  She prioritises her appearance over most things, another stereotype of girls none-the-less true.  She philosophises about beauty being the key to success in life and refers to Madonna "Madonna's still goin coz she looks after 'er image and she's already the same as meh mum".  Her innocence and that naiveness that she has to believe things that she's probably been told by her mum when she was way younger, makes us sympathise for her as she doesn't know what the reality of the matter is.

When the woman at the counter in the department store asks her if she's going to buy the product she just tried, the girl responds "I'm actually taking it home so my mum can smell for my hand, she's blind".  The girl blatantly lied about her mum because she doesn't want anyone to be intrusive about her personal life.
 It's an outrageous lie, but legible as to why she said that.

She has high aspirations to be "dead rich and famous" and "drinking bacardi breezers" which she thinks is top class.  This shows us that she's so uneducated that her views about what is upper class isn't accurate at all.  She speaks of her experiences with her dad, cramped in a caravan, comparing it to that of a shoe box.  She mentions her dad buying them a 99 ice-cream with strawberry sauce because her mum couldn't as it was apparently raining, and her dad "shoved his in 'er face".  This could be a metaphor for the abuse that she witnessed as she says she "couldn't tell if it was blood or strawberry sauce.".

As the film progresses, we see that she looks a lot in the direction of the river that she's walking by, like something's there.  There's one shot inparticular where she takes an abnormally long pause from her rapid way of speech.  She looks down, depressed and for a split second it feels eerie.  The girl refers to a dog of hers that died - it was thrown in the canal.  She pauses at the canal and the high-angle shot of her is the only high-angle in the film.  It shows her vulnerability and suggests that she has some bad experiences at the canal.  Her unusually long pause is uncharacteristic of her - despite the fact that we've only got to know her in nearly 10 minutes, she's been talking extremely fast and her pause symbolises a change.  She looks down whilst saying "I've gotten dead good at hiding things".  Notice how she's only mentioned the word "dead" twice in the film, despite the fact that she speaks a lot of slang and abbreviates words, she's never mentioned the word "dead" up until now and she looks depressed as she says it.  The white bag that she has raises our suspisions because it seems to have a lot in it and as she's said "hiding", due to her poor family and circumstances, we stereotype her as a thief.

She casually chucks the bag in to the water.  The underwater shot that we see is a low angle of the bag and the soundeffect is that of underwater air compression.  This soundeffect combined with the low angle of the plastic bag make us feel clautrophobic as the bag represents encagement.  Notice how heavy the bag looks as it goes in to the water: it sinks down.  This tells us that there's something important in there.  It cuts back to the high angle shot of her and she leaves the canal.  She says "I'm still going to have a 99", giving us the benefit of the doubt that maybe the thing in the bag wasn't so important afterall.

What happens next has the audience suspended in disbelief: we a foetus coming out the bag, stained in blood.  It evokes a nauseas, queezy feeling from us because it's so bewildering.  We acknowledge that it's her aborted baby - why else would she hide it?

The foetus is ejected from the bag like it's nothing, similar to the way in which the girl feels like she's been ejected from her family.  It's symbolic of the rejection she feels and the metaphorical claustrophobia her mum has caused for treating her like a child.  The blood connotes cause and effect: her dad has mentally scared the girl by effectively disowning her.  The penultimate shot of the film is that of the bag in which the foetus was in, floating towards a net, symbolising enclosure and life coming to a grind.  Her singing acts as a sound-bridge between that shot and the last shot of her slowly walking, sounding like she's choking on the lyrics to "Stronger" by Britney Spears. 

This is an extremely low budget, the most expensive thing would've been the locations, the actors and the prosthetic baby that was used at the end.  It would've costed under £30, 000 for a film.  Not much is needed to divulge the plot to the audience (as it deals with poverty, domestic violence and rejectment) apart from a good script.  There's no background music at all in the film, the only music we can hear is the vocals of the girl singing.  The focus of the plot is primarily on the girl and her singing explains everything - "I've had enough" tells the story of her life.  The film is laced with hints all along that she is hiding a bigger secret and suffering from domestic abuse/neglection, but this isn't elaborated in words by the girl.  Things we don't deem as important are all of a sudden brought up, like her coat that she's wearing and her bag, which we don't think is an important prop until one line in the film where she reveals that she hides things.  Suddenly we see that there is a big story behind the coat (hiding her pregnancy) and her bag (hiding the baby in).

She wants us to see her as independant and self-confident when she is actually terrified and probably being bullied.  The film gives the audience many assumptions as to the problems that she has even though it teaches us not to make assumptions simply on what we see.

Structurally, the cutaways elaborate on her situation way further than she does through speaking.  This tells us that she's shy and narratively, she acts as the narrator to her life and drops hints about her troubles, but she moves on very quickly.  The film is a placid example of how the plot exceeds the budget in terms of importance.  Overall - 'About A Girl' as the title suggests, is about a girl and teaches us as an audience that if you don't expect a lot from something then you'll come away loving it.  Even though the topic of poverty and domestic violence was very low in film in context of the year it was released in, it raises our expectations of what a film narratively should be like and it's a complete refresher in what it teaches us about people.