The Girl Who Wasn’t Missing
Shane Ryan likes to work in an exploitation style and tone. The more I’ve come to understand about exploitation cinema, the more I’ve watched of Ryan’s work (this is his fifth film I’ve seen now), the more his style comes into focus for me. It’s almost enough for me to watch his “My Name is ‘A’ for Anonymous” again to see if I feel differently about it now, but reading back at my review of his only other feature film I’ve seen, “The Girl Who Wasn’t Missing” seems to have some of the same issues, although it didn’t really land with the thud the earlier film did, for me.
“The Girl Who Wasn’t Missing” begins with a girl (Kai Lanette, who co-wrote the script with Ryan) being gang-raped. There’s a bit of the girl walking around before the scene, but that’s the first significant piece of drama in the film, and it’s an ugly scene. But, and this is an important point, it isn’t exploitation and is pretty brutal to watch. These are anonymous men- Ryan doesn’t even show their faces- and we see the pain in the girl as she is trying to put her pants back on afterwards. This is closer to the brutality of “Irreversible” than “I Spit on Your Grave,” and thank god for that. Shortly after, she goes into a store and gets a pregnancy test- it is positive. Her dad finds it, and decides she cannot live there anymore. She doesn’t say anything about how it happened or her trauma, and she leaves. For the next 50 minutes of the film’s 70, we watch as she tries to survive on the streets.
One of the things that has distinguished Ryan’s style in all of his films is his de-prioritizing of dialogue and what we’ve come to expect from traditional narrative storytelling. This is a blessing in some of his shorts (“Paper Kids,” “Guerrilla”), but, because of the length of feature films, it can be a hindrance in our ability to engage in the story. So much of this film is just the girl (who doesn’t have a name, although she doesn’t really need one) walking around, trying to live her life as best she can, given the circumstances, trying to find shelter any way she can, sans dialogue, and it can ware on the patience. We don’t get the feeling of progression through the story, and it’s just stagnant to watch, at times. I stayed with the film as it went on, because Ryan’s visual and sonic style (his use of music and sound) is so compelling, but it wasn’t always easy to do. That said, I did feel more of an engagement with the girl here than I did with his characters in “My Name is ‘A’ for Anonymous” because he has a better hold on this material, and how to make it work, than he did with that, which didn’t really come into focus until the end.
“The Girl Who Wasn’t Missing” is split into two parts, set a year apart in time frame, and the second part shows the girl in what her life is after a year on the streets. She is making due, but she’s had to make some choices that make you wonder what Ryan is getting at with his ending here. Was this young woman (whose age is unknown, though we get the sense that she’s still in school) destined to make these choices because of her circumstances? I cannot imagine they were the only ones she had available to her. And what happened in the year from the time she curled up underneath an overpass to the time she is cleaning up in a public bathroom? I certainly think there’s honesty and truth in the way Ryan and Lanette close out this story, but this is a time when the de-emphasis on dialogue to tell the story hurts the story, in my opinion. It feels as though Ryan is leaving big chunks of the story out, and while I’m glad I’ve had a chance to see it, it feels like the certainty Ryan has in his storytelling didn’t translate to how a viewer will see it. I wish I felt otherwise at the end of this film.
