The Romantic Agony of The Falling

Florence Pugh and Maisie Williams enjoy some splendor in the grass in The Falling

I watched Carol Morley's The Falling, currently streaming on Tubi, primarily because it was Florence Pugh's film debut and I think she is the most interesting actor to emerge in the last decade or so. However, I was unexpectedly taken by this 2014 film and recommend it to the adventuresome. The film is set at an alternative girls school in England circa 1969 where, in a case of mass hysteria, the students begin fainting, first individually and then en masse. Spoilers follow...

Abbie (Pugh) and Lydia (Maisie Williams) are best friends, united by their regard for each other and a shared rebelliousness. Their friendship has an almost erotic intensity common to female besties who have not quite ventured into the tumult of heterosexual courtship, like Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It. Things begin to shift when Abbie begins to have sexual experiences with boys, including Lydia's brother, and Lydia feels a little left behind. After her sexual initiation, Abbie begins experiencing fainting spells. Morley explicitly links the ecstatic loss of control experienced during these spells with sexual release. She also links the spells with the occult or, as the pentagram button wearing brother puts it, "sex magick with a k". Abbie dies after one of her fainting spells, a death that has no rational explanation, but that is explained away as "natural". The contagion is not contained, though, and soon the girls of the school are swooning and dropping left and right.

If one is tied down by the dictates of realism, The Falling must seem a muddle. Morley goes to great lengths to avoid any grand psychological reasoning for the fainting spells. What she is concerned with is the pagan pantheism of England's heritage bursting underneath the Christian morality of official culture. The "non-denominational' chapel the school puts on is an empty ritual where students and faculty rotely sing hymns like "All Things Bright and Beautiful." A living culture exists elsewhere. The school seems cut off from the world at large, but the school's grounds are teeming with the natural beauty of falling leaves and swans gliding on the pond. When Pugh recites a Wordsworth poem, "Ode on Intimations on Immortality", a link is made with the Romantics who could spy the preternatural in a puddle. 

Morley links this with 1969 by using pop songs of the period and original music from Tracey Thorne, tunes that seem more truly alive than the moldy old bromides sung in chapel. This is apt because the pop stars of that era were truly the descendants of the English Romantics in their rejection of traditional British culture and religion. Donovan, whose "Voyage of the Moon" is sung by both Mary Hopkin and Ms. Pugh in the film, was the nature loving successor to Wordsworth of the flower power era and, like Wordsworth, had a very limited shelf life as a vital artist. Like the Romantics, Morley explores aspects of sex that exist outside the confines of English Christian morality: namely sapphism and incest. Now these themes, particularly Lydia's infatuation with her brother probably doomed the film commercially, but I admire Morley sticking to her guns and exploring aspects of the Romantic tradition that usually get swept under the rug. Certainly, Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley all had a more than passing interest in the theme of incest.

Rationally, I can understand those with issues with The Falling. Pugh, the life force of the picture, is killed off too soon and the film's climax provides little catharsis. However, the film and its concerns stuck with me. The performances of the leads are spot on as are the contributions of Maxine Peak, Anna Burnett, Greta Scaachi, Monica Dolan, and Joe Cole. I group the film with other works by English filmmakers, particularly Ben Wheatley and Mark Jenkin, who are interested in exploring the pagan roots of Perfidious Albion.