“The wind seems to blow colder here. There’s a dark decay under the surface. And it torments. People are cruel. But I cling to the beauty. Even in death.”
So says Fay Corr (Laura Bayston) in voice-over at the beginning of Paul Holbrook’s latest short film When She Sings (which Bayston co-wrote). Her words are accompanied by a monochrome montage of aerial shots showing a seaside town – off-season, abandoned, dead – and the beach beyond, where five people stand with their backs to camera staring at something on the sand.
The beach is a liminal space, in slow-motion transition as its very form is being constantly carved out by the collision of solid ground with the liquid infinity beyond. It is a place where reality meets the imagination, where fixity collides with fluidity, where erosion leads to a sea change – and where local artist Fay often comes with her sketchpad for inspiration when she is not working in the local chippie or running her empty boarding house. It is also where the corpse of her beloved sister (Roseanna Anderson), likewise an artist, was found, even if conflicting flashbacks to that moment suggest that Fay is still in a certain denial as to what happened to her. As Fay obsessively sketches and paints mermaids, hybrid creatures that transgress the boundary between terrestrial and marine, living and dead, she will also have a series of Lynchian encounters with five peculiar locals, The Creep (Garrick Hogan), The Old Fishwife (Carrie Cohen), The Greasy Fryer (Paul Cooper), The Godly Woman (Julia Hills) and The Mute (Keane Holbrook), all of whom pass on ominous messages to her about the abiding presence of her late sister whose siren song can still be heard if only Fay will listen.
Fay is struggling to process her feelings of loss, grief and depression through her art, and to capture a dark mythic image of death itself – and that is precisely what Holbrook and Bayston are also doing with this deeply unsettling portrait of a community’s dilapidation and of a woman’s unravelling psychogeography. Opening in black and white like Fay’s sketches, before switching to the vivid colour of her paintings, When She Sings is a study in breakdown and rot which always clings to the beauty. It is a melancholic, macabre work whose disturbing, upsetting content may, as its coda suggests, not be for everyone, which is of course true for all art. Yet those of us whom this does touch will see an emerging picture of haunting sublimity, and will be left shivering and transformed, as though from a bracing constitutional along the shoreline.
strap: A tale of two sisters: Paul Holbrook’s short is a tale of an artist unraveling with grief in a declining seaside community
© Anton Bitel
