owen said:
found samantha norton a little annoying...overdid the mysterious ingenue bit for my taste
I have heard that comment from others also, but only seems valid from a realist/character-driven standpoint. For me she is perfect as a sort of blank ego-less fluid identity - (Camus' Outsider-like) lack of "normal" reaction to his suicide, the way she inserts her name into his novel, her absorption in the music tape/walkman, wanderings around the local pubs/houses/parties/supermarket/workplace, Scottish highlands, Ibiza (rep-organised "fun", clubs, rural religious pageant & countryside), etc all couldn't help but remind me of Deleuze & Guattarri's Anti-Oedipus' description of the schizo's stroll, slipping in and out of the various machines of life with a benign open-ness to whatever works for any particular time and place.
It seemed to me that Ramsay was trying to create in Callar a kind of non-Oedipal subjectivity no longer driven by ego-demands (like her friend), but surfing the waves of desire wherever they take her. Norton's affectless but absorbed face seemed to perfectly reflect this, part child-like, part teenage refusal to settle into an "adult" personality (a set of identifying ego-idiosyncrasies which teenagers - rightly? - seem to despise as a set of off-the-shelf ham-actor cliches)