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Maidenhead was developed by Marie from a series of dream fragments. She wrote these down over a long period, and then workshopped them under performance and dramatic conditions with actor Alice Gardner. From these workshops, Marie then devised the final set of narrative chapters which comprise the final script.
As there is no overarching theme - or least no singular dramatic arc - to Maidenhead, the idea of scoring a 'net' of themes was deemed inappropriate. The beauty of the film is the way in which it portrays Alice nonchalantly so that the film itself seems not concerned with summing up any specific or distincitve purpose in her being. This avoidance of scriptwriting-101 is refreshing, plus it allows greater space for a psychological 'reflectiveness' in revealing and documenting Alice's character without justifying her actions.
Following the way that the Alice character is thus mostly non-plussed and seems vaguely detached from her situations and surroundings, the idea was to mesh the film score with the sound design so as to create a semi-realistic environment which nonetheless appears aurally heightened or even unlikely and inappropriate. In most cases, the sound elements are from actual and verifiable locations which connect to the onscreen depiction, but they have been modified - sometimes subtly, other times obviously. In other cases, the sounds are 'naturalistic' but they are entirelyb divorced from their onscreen location. (Philip provided these 'trans-world' sound elements and Craig Carter handled the sound editing and dialogue editing.)
The result is not so much to portray an interior mind state of Alice - remembering that she herself is mostly mildy quizzical and generally non-judgemental in the various situations she finds herself in. Instead, the sound design creates spaces which confirm that they are not what they appear, yet there is no concern expressed by Alice and others that these spaces may not be what they appear. This option has been explored in marked contast to the obvious tack of sonically and musically rendering the spaces 'dream-like' - which usually means resorting to cliches like tacky echoed flutes, spooky ambient soundscapes or surrealism-101 style-clashes. Ultimately, Maidenhead depicts Alice as devoid of angst, apprehension or alientation: she is at home in her wnadering terrain, relieved of heroic journey's and gendered histrionics.
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy