Nynaeve

Entertaining, nicely shot, well-scripted for the most part, even if the themes and plot aren't original. Good performances by Tara Fitzgerald and Sam Neill in particular and Estella is a sympathetic character as a woman in a lust-free marriage discovering her sexuality.

There were a few issues that personally interfered with my appreciation of the movie and its message that cause it to not hold up so well 25+ years later. One is that the approach to sexuality and consent feels outdated. The characters' regularly intruding on the protagonist's boundaries often gets in the way of what the writer/director apparently intend to be a sex-positive narrative. The direction is male gazey - nearly all of the nudity is female. Boundaries are intruded upon, consent is negligable (including tricking the local stud into thinking he's sleeping with a different woman - it was creepy in Revenge of the Nerds and it was creepy here) , sexual harassment is rampant (and not criticized - Estella's fault for being so uptight) and skeevy behavior - unwanted touching, being watched while asleep and half-naked - from men and women - is prevalent. I assumed watching this that some of this creepiness was intentional in order to add nuance and balance to the conversation about sex, prudishness and the concept of decency, but the end of the film seems to idealize the Lindsay crew in a way that doesn't feel deserved based on the story and characters up to that point.

There was a lot to like about God Help the Girl but despite a few good individual scenes, but it didn't flow together as a story that well. Maybe writer/director Stuart Murdoch needed more creative feedback and better editors than he got. Certain scenes and characters just show up out of nowhere with little connection to the rest of the story, like the WTF scene of Eve going on a bender with some girl we never see before or since. The main character of Eve was weakly written. Her past and her motivations were vague. The movie would have been far better with James and Cassie as main characters and Eve as a side character.

You could see God Help The Girl as a culmination of Belle & Sebastian's (a band named after a fictional band that Murdoch's songwriting centered on) characters and themes spanning their nearly 20 years as a band. James, Cassie and Eve seem derived from the archetypal characters from B&S's songs. The movie though develops them in a shallow and haphazard way that doesn't really do justice to the insights and characters brilliantly explored in the individual songs. I think Murdoch could make a good movie, but God Help The Girl was just so-so. The music was excellent at least.