what the full picture is until it’s all finished and you stand
back. I always explain it by saying if you think about the
unveiling of Dolly the Sheep, Dolly was version 383. So
you can imagine what the 54th iteration of Dolly must have
looked like – probably, like a little bit of wool sticking out
of an organ. A script goes through a similar process and is
probably at some points equally ugly and non-functional.
At one stage, there was a car chase with guns in the mix.”
Often, for a rape-revenge film all one needs is – to
paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard – a wronged girl, a gun,
and a male victim who deserves to take a bullet. If Malloy
and Lawlor were not strictly thinking of the genre when
they first wrote Rose Plays Julie, they have nevertheless
made something that sits adjacent to it; leaner, less
sensationalised and less gratuitously violent than Revenge
or Holiday, it is more interested in the psychological
aspects of rape than in the psychotic, cathartic possibility
of vengeance. At its centre is a delicate performance by Ann
Skelly, a near-unknown that Molloy and Lawlor chose for
her “soft and steely” presence: fine-boned, with a heart-
shaped face that draws immediate focus to her eyes, her
silences prove to be more unnerving than a spoken threat.
Rose Plays Julie’s accidental timeliness has the effect
of making it more interesting than it might have been in
2013, its interest in trauma that is not only immediate but
generational is intriguing in the context of a world where,
for the first time, rape is being discussed by women
of all ages. It may be that the subject of violence – and
particularly sexual violence – against women has been in
the air in some form or another for the last five or so years,
an escalating sense of the pervasive, ugly wrong-ness of
heterosexual, patriarchal culture giving rise to several films
that seek to redress the imbalance. Of these films, Molloy
and Lawlor’s is perhaps the quietest, the least outrageous.
Like its heroine, it plays a longer, subtler gameseven years to make a feature film,” Lawlor agrees. “So
you don’t want to stitch it to the current headlines of any
political issue – you want to go a bit deeper so that it has
longevity. With a short film you can turn that around faster,
and you can be more responsive. But the production of
feature films is glacial.”
Like a number of iconic films about women with
fragmented identities – “women,” as David Lynch has
said, “in trouble” – Rose Plays Julie incorporates the idea
of acting and, more specifically, the totemic figure of the
actress: Rose’s mother, Ellen, plays at being other women
for a living, just as she has spent her life pretending not to
be a mother. When Rose dresses up as Julie, she adopts a
cropped, dark wig, a nod to the way that in what the critic
Miriam Bale calls “persona swap” films, there is often some
psychosexual interplay between a blonde, and a more
sinister brunette. “I guess we were really thinking about
our own obsessions,” Malloy recalls. “So we picked up
some elements from our short film Helen, about a girl who
is trying to find out who she is, and brought it into the realm
of adoption, and not knowing about your parents. I guess
our thinking was to come at rape from the idea of a child
being conceived, and learning that your conception was
bound up in a violent act. We were specifically interested
in the long-term impact of rape on a woman, rather than
on the act itself. The revenge element fell into place slowly
but surely, and the clarity around that came much later.
The other elements were in place from the beginning. So it
probably took at least the first draft or two for the revenge
to appear, and then the nature of that revenge and how it
was going to be expressed came later still.”
“There’s a Steven Soderbergh quote,” Lawlor says,
“where he likens making a feature film to making a mosaic
ten miles long with your nose six inches from the wall.
You know what each tile is, but you don’t really know“OUR THINKING WAS TO COME AT RAPE
FROM THE IDEA OF A CHILD LEARNING
THAT YOUR CONCEPTION WAS BOUND
UP IN A VIOLENT ACT.”
052 The Promising Young Woman Issue