Phone Gal: A Short Film by Laura Lewis-Barr

Every LLB short film is based on, or references a particular fairy tale.  And fairy tales, to hear Jungian proponents tell it, are generally informed by Jungian precepts (whether the respective authors/originators of those fairy tales knew it or not).  Laura Lewis-Barr is a card-carrying Jungian proponent.  

Phone Gal, as discussed, finds its basis in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.”  In this renowned and beloved fairy tale (first published in 1845), a little girl is sent out into the cold on New Year’s Eve by her poor family to essentially beg for money by ostensibly selling matches.  She ends up barefoot and freezing, and begins lighting her matches – one by one – in order to keep warm.  Within the light of each match she strikes, the little girl experiences happy visions of warmth, love, comfort, and kindness.  The combination of the warmth from each match’s flame, and the joyful visions revealed therein, prove impossible for the freezing little girl to resist, so she continues to strike each match.  Her final vision involves her kindly grandmother, long dead, who nevertheless appears before her in very real and lively fashion, courtesy of the match’s flame.  At this point, the little girl, who has perished in the freezing cold, accompanies her grandmother to Heaven.  It is a beautiful story which encompasses a number of powerful morals and themes.  Discussions of courage, determination, hopefulness, imagination, charity, selflessness, love, wanting, and even fear are generally de rigueur in any academic analysis of the story.

But Phone Gal‘s creator detects another theme in the classic fairy tale – and uses it to startling effect in the film: addiction.

In terms of the fairy tale, doesn’t the little girl’s behavior indicate even a fragmentary level of addiction?  She is, after all, unable to deny herself the very real physical effects of each match flame’s warmth, and the joy she derives from each corresponding buoying vision.  “Addiction” is not a word that would’ve ever occurred to me (nor would its attendant implications have ever sprung to my mind) in my own analysis of this lovely, iconic story.  But “addiction” is precisely what LLB had in mind as a key derivation from the fairy tale’s story line, and as a major thematic underpinning of Phone Gal.  (Is this evidence of Ms. Lewis-Barr’s Jungian scholarship manifesting itself?)  The filmmaker, identifying this theme in Andersen’s story, isolates it, and rips it wide open like one of those tiny scabs you find on your shin, finally scratch off, and can’t get to quit leaking blood.

In any case, it’s this latching on to Andersen’s unlikely – but entirely discernable and, now, undeniable (currently, I just can’t seem to un-see it) – theme of addiction by the filmmaker that drives Phone Gal to its shuddering denouement, and has provided me with the second big reason that I find the film so powerful, and why I chose it as my first-to-review LLB short film.  I was absolutely fascinated by this take on the fairy tale, and by its fueling of the film’s fire, so to speak.  Reviewing this one was a no-brainer for me.

The third reason I picked Phone Gal to review first – and why I feel it’s an excellent film – is simply that its impact on me was so profound.  Through her use of lighting, suggestive imagery (watch the faces of the characters illuminate in certain scenes, as the little match girl’s must have done as she struck each fateful match), and music and sound, and her incorporation of a surprising, powerful theme, the filmmaker drove Phone Gal to its succinct and definitive point in short order, and left me pretty much stunned.  Experiencing this short film’s power was, for me, sort of like grabbing a frayed lamp cord in one hand, and feeling the coursing electricity – that alternating current’s jolt and surge – then immediately dropping the cord. 

But unlike a real electric shock, I wanted to experience the electromotive force of the film itself again, and again.