A girl living in England during the Edwardian period has a great ambition to become a doctor, but the society she is living in does not encourage young ladies to aspire to anything more than a comfortable marriage. By supernatural means, she comes into contact with another girl of the same age, but living in the 1990s, who is unhappy in her present life. The two girls swap places. A nicely made production, probably intended chiefly for older children; many adults will enjoy it too.
2 Reviews
Radical! (spoiler in the last paragraph)
the red duchess22 March 2001
Warning: Spoilers
Antidotes to more brain-light, populist children's entertainment can be very middle-class, idealistic, aspirational, the kind of wholesome thing parents want their kids to watch, rather than what the kids want to watch. And 'Emily's Ghost' seems to fit that bill, with its Edwardian aristocratic setting (and all the costume and nature fetishising that implies), its impoverished gentry family (so poor they can only afford a large country estate, a carriage, four servants, a governess and a boarding school for darling James), and characters with nice accents, and names like Emily and Charlotte.
These kinds of films don't offer inebriated elephants or wisecracking bears, but salutary instruction. These lessons are generally reactionary, and, considering the subject matter, we might expect homilies on the joys of property and family. So the first lovable achievement of this marvellous film is that it is feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal and socialist.
The heroine Emily is a disruptive tom-boy with a pet rat called Emmeline (after, somewhat unflatteringly, the great feminist Pankhurst) whose explosive scientific experiments have forced her family to move to the country. she is not really maliciously cheeky, being more of a careless daydreamer, but she is lethal when crossed, as witness the hosing her absurdly patriotic governess gets for reprimanding her. She chafes at the bit of her society which gives boys every social, economic and educational advantage, and sees women as cattle for the marriage market; Emily wants to go to college.
She befriends a local peasant in a relationship of Lawrentian possibilities, and his brutal poverty increases her radicalism. She befriends the amiably sinister butler played by Fagin, Ron Moody, encouraging his pilfering her dad's cigars in an action mirroring her brother's furtive enjoyment of adult photographs or cigar-smoking.
The disruption Emily causes is manifold, not confined to her family. Her being haunted by a ghost is literal, and chillingly evoked here in her visions of drowning and the frightening bleached-blue nightmare where the camera racing up on her seems about to violate her. But the idea of the ghost of a double called Emily, has symbolic resonances familiar from ghost stories - the repression of women leading to a schizophrenia between duty and desire; or representing the ghosts of women repressed throughout history, or the working classes ignored by generations of Emily's family.
The disruption figures in the strange way the film is shot, balancing seriousness and frivolity (there's a wonderful scene where Emily's staid Victorian father can't stop burping). The film was made with a largely adolescent crew, and this may account for the abrupt, elliptical editing, the off-centre framing, the incongruity in some of the acting, the shifts in pacing, the sun-blasted lighting, the vivid camera movements; but I like to see this as part of Emily's disturbing, the tensions within her and her culture finding expression in the instability of form.
The title points to the film's real punch. A pre-credit sequence features a girl experimenting in her homemade laboratory, causing an explosion. One assumes the film will narrate the adventures of Emily the ghost, a Casper-like creature; but the blast was non-fatal, and she is soon haunted by someone else. However, in a gobsmacking, Borgesian, Benjaminian twist, Emily IS revealed to be a ghost after all, the entire fiction dreamt, or feared, by another consciousness in the future. The philosophical implication of this, in a Children's Film Foundation movie, are staggering, bizarre, and a cause for rejoicing.
These kinds of films don't offer inebriated elephants or wisecracking bears, but salutary instruction. These lessons are generally reactionary, and, considering the subject matter, we might expect homilies on the joys of property and family. So the first lovable achievement of this marvellous film is that it is feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal and socialist.
The heroine Emily is a disruptive tom-boy with a pet rat called Emmeline (after, somewhat unflatteringly, the great feminist Pankhurst) whose explosive scientific experiments have forced her family to move to the country. she is not really maliciously cheeky, being more of a careless daydreamer, but she is lethal when crossed, as witness the hosing her absurdly patriotic governess gets for reprimanding her. She chafes at the bit of her society which gives boys every social, economic and educational advantage, and sees women as cattle for the marriage market; Emily wants to go to college.
She befriends a local peasant in a relationship of Lawrentian possibilities, and his brutal poverty increases her radicalism. She befriends the amiably sinister butler played by Fagin, Ron Moody, encouraging his pilfering her dad's cigars in an action mirroring her brother's furtive enjoyment of adult photographs or cigar-smoking.
The disruption Emily causes is manifold, not confined to her family. Her being haunted by a ghost is literal, and chillingly evoked here in her visions of drowning and the frightening bleached-blue nightmare where the camera racing up on her seems about to violate her. But the idea of the ghost of a double called Emily, has symbolic resonances familiar from ghost stories - the repression of women leading to a schizophrenia between duty and desire; or representing the ghosts of women repressed throughout history, or the working classes ignored by generations of Emily's family.
The disruption figures in the strange way the film is shot, balancing seriousness and frivolity (there's a wonderful scene where Emily's staid Victorian father can't stop burping). The film was made with a largely adolescent crew, and this may account for the abrupt, elliptical editing, the off-centre framing, the incongruity in some of the acting, the shifts in pacing, the sun-blasted lighting, the vivid camera movements; but I like to see this as part of Emily's disturbing, the tensions within her and her culture finding expression in the instability of form.
The title points to the film's real punch. A pre-credit sequence features a girl experimenting in her homemade laboratory, causing an explosion. One assumes the film will narrate the adventures of Emily the ghost, a Casper-like creature; but the blast was non-fatal, and she is soon haunted by someone else. However, in a gobsmacking, Borgesian, Benjaminian twist, Emily IS revealed to be a ghost after all, the entire fiction dreamt, or feared, by another consciousness in the future. The philosophical implication of this, in a Children's Film Foundation movie, are staggering, bizarre, and a cause for rejoicing.
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