UK director Carol Morley’s latest film, The Falling, examines mass fainting fits experienced by young women in an all-girls’ school in the late ’60s. “I wanted to celebrate the phenomena of mass psychogenesis, the mass response,” she says. Although inspired by true events (and in part by Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures), Morley’s film is a fictional story starring Maisie Williams (Game Of Thrones’ Arya Stark) as the 16-year-old protagonist, Lydia.
“Lots of people have told me after seeing the film that fainting epidemics happened at their school – girls fainting all at the same time,” says Morley. “It happens a lot more than we know. It’s very complex and interesting, and it mostly occurs amongst adolescent girls; it’s common at that age. There is something young women have – what do you call it? Empathy? Connection? They have connected feelings. I wanted to celebrate that power – not attribute it to ‘just hormones’.
“In the past, women who experienced mass psychogenesis were subjected to witch trials. They were being punished for being carnal, for being interested in creating potions to cure illness. “Their communities turned against them and it resulted in genocide of women. It’s the age when young women explore things like the Ouija board. There’s a character, Kenneth – Lydia’s older brother – who’s sort of into the occult. He talks about things like ley lines. He’s a ’60s boy reading philosophical books, he’s into [occultist] Aleister Crowley, and he thinks that maybe there’s a power to the young women.”
Morley set her story in a girls’ school at a time when society itself was in flux. “I set the film in a single-sex school setting so they don’t have issues with young men, or weren’t around them that much,” says the director. “I wanted to explore that setting without creating that typical old schoolyard, bitchy world. The girls are at a really critical age; they are young women working out who they want to be.
“The ’60s themselves were a really adolescent time,” Morley continues. “It was a changing time; society was on the verge of change. We had this amazing technological innovation, sending a man to the moon, yet women still had to wear these big belts to keep their sanitary napkins on. In 1968 the abortion laws were passed in the UK and there were no longer back street abortions, but it would have still been very difficult to get one. There are lots of representations in film of Swinging London, but most people were still set back in so many ways in this country. I wanted to have a look at the ’60s in a much more internal way.”
Morley says audience responses to The Falling have been overwhelmingly positive so far. “This film has touched people, across genders. Female subjectivity is still not represented that much – it’s still strange, so this is a challenging film. It makes you think about your own experiences.”
Playing the lead role, Williams was a wonderful contributor to the film. “Maisie was available to me at 16, which was the right age for the role,” says Morley. And it wasn’t the youngster’s presence in Game Of Thrones that led to her casting. “I’ve never seen Game Of Thrones!” the director says. “I had no concept of the character, no preconceptions. I watched an audition tape and watched a few interviews with her on YouTube. She was really able to step into the character, to bring her to life.
“She brings such complexity and maturity to the role, and Lydia is not quite likeable. Maisie creates a complex representation of what it is to be a teenage girl. As a director, you get possessive over your actors. You don’t want to think they’ve played anyone else!”
The Falling (dir. Carol Morley) is showing at the Australian Centre For The Moving Image, Melbourne, Monday June 29 – Sunday July 26.
