Martha Marcy May Marlene 瑪蓮邪教離魂曲)

My sixth film at the HKIFF is a slow-burn psychological drama about how a young girl who had been brainwashed by a charming, charismatic but subtly manipulative leader lording over, in the name of brotherly, sisterly and fatherly love and sharing, an extremely small cult of idealistic, well-meaning but immature and credulous teenagers and young adults, mostly females, who are in one way or another disillusioned by the values of the ceaseless pursuit for money, status and egotism in mainstream America, readjusting after two or more years there to "normal" life in a lakeside Connecticut holiday home owned by her sister and only surviving relative in this world and her stereo-type yuppie husband.

The film Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) winner of the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival, is the debut feature film of a talented young American director Sean Durkin, who wrote the screenplay himself. The drama is played out by 4 principal actors, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen ), her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) and the cult leader Patrick (John Hawkes).

As the film opens, we see a girl running away into the woods,hiding in a hollow from the pursuing inmates of a broken down farm house equipped with just the bare essentials for survival. She calls Lucy, her estranged, guilt ridden and solicitous middle class sister and her sole surviving relative, from a payphone in a road side cafe and greyhound bus station. She looks scared and confused and is in obvious distress. Her sister asks her to wait for her, picks her up in her car and takes her into her beautiful rented lakeside vacation home in Connecticut where she was spending her annual 2 weeks holiday with her husband Ted, pending the completion of their official home closer to New York  City. Martha obviously does not behave in a "socially acceptable" manner. e.g. she would think nothing of swimming naked in the lake in full view of the neighbors and would sneak into her sister's bedroom to lay beside her in her bed whilst her sister is making love with her husband and after having stayed a while in her sister's house when it was suggested to her that it was about time she thought about what she would like to do with her life like finding a job, she protested that it was not necessary and that Ted's life about measuring success by money and possession was simply "not right".

Whilst still recovering from her recent trauma, she freaked out during a party thrown by her sister at the house when she met a man serving drinks who looked like Patrick, the cult leader who welcomed her into the cult, "initiated" her into it by "doing" her from behind after she is "prepared" by putting on a special ritual white dress and drinking a herbal tea, watched his group having communal sex from a step in the staircase, strummed on the guitar a song specially dedicated to Marcy May, a name he gave her to symbolize the acquisition of her new identity (Martha Marlene on the outside but Marcy May inside) said she was "special" because she was "a teacher and a leader" an ideal which her sister had pushed her to achieve in her own way but failed to, taught her how to do farm work and shoot with a pistol and who decreed that the women should eat only after the men have finished in their little "commune" and who periodically caused some of his cult members to burgle into the houses of wealthy house owners nearby and steal whatever they needed and on one occasion even killed its innocent owner for fear of his reporting them to the police. It was probably a combination of the violence that she witnessed coupled with her role in "initiating" another new teenage girl into the cult and her feeling that she had somehow been "betrayed" that finally caused her to run away.

Until the end of the film, when we see Martha being driven in Lucy's car by the latter to seek outside help after a violent episode in which she yanked Ted down a flight of steps when she was in one of her "states", she never spilled a single word about what happened to her during those half sweet and half traumatized years in that barn-like small "self-sufficient" alternative commune. What would happen to her? It's anyone's guess. Whatever the outcome may be, it's certain that Durkin seems to want us to think a little about two kinds of very contrasting social values and the respective strengths and weaknesses of each. But I don't this aspect is much developed or very much emphasized. He seems quite happy to "just  present" what happened.

The film was done in a very natural, low keyed way as we see Martha gliding between the present and her recent past, between reality and her occasional flash back to her life at that Manson-like cult. I like the way in which Durkin slowly unravels piece by piece the puzzle of  what happened before Martha finally decided to escape from that isolated and closed community. Olsen was excellent as an actress. She conveyed perfectly the stupor, the confusion in her disturbed mind, the conflict of emotions, the blurring of boundaries between illusion and reality and her uncertainty about what to believe any more, haunted by what she went through during those two or three years. and her resolution not to tell even her sister what she went on at the commune because she was sure that her sister and her husband would never understand her. here were some really sensuous photography and music was used sensitively to create just the right kind of atmosphere at the commune.Not a perfect film perhaps but to me, certainly one which deserves to be seen by more.