On Movies: Browning sings praises of musical ‘Girl’

It doesn't take long for Emily Browning to break into song in God Help the Girl. The first scene of Stuart Murdoch's impossibly charming Glasgow tale - of a young woman and the friends she makes and the hearts she breaks - is of Browning's character Eve on the run from a mental health facility.

"I look down the barrel of the gun" - that is, straight into the camera - "and I start singing," says the actress.

God Help the Girl, opening Friday at the PFS Roxy, declares its intentions immediately.

"If you know from the beginning that you're in a musical, you're able to lose yourself in it, and it makes more sense," says Browning, on the phone from New York. "But I've never really had a problem with people bursting into song at any point in a film - or in life. I find that most enjoyable."

Browning, an Australian, is probably best known at this point in her career as the gun-toting Babydoll in Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. The actress has long been a fan of Murdoch's band, Belle and Sebastian, so when she heard he was making a film, she sent off her audition tape, crooning and all. Murdoch had the good sense to cast her - along with Olly Alexander and Hannah Murray. Their three characters meet, start a band, and go off from there - into a Murdochian world of country rambles, French New Wave runs-down-alleyways, and references to books, music, and art that knowingly point you in the right direction.

Originally conceived as a spinoff band and album by Murdoch, God Help the Girl became a movie thanks to a Kickstarter campaign and the involvement of Barry Mendel, the producer who shepherded Wes Anderson's Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums to the screen.

Murdoch had shot a few music videos, but never a full-blown feature - with plot, dialogue, cast, crew.

"At the beginning of rehearsals, Stuart said, 'I might need a little bit of help. You guys have worked a lot, maybe you can give me a hand,' " Browning recalls. "But he didn't need it at all. He knew exactly what he was doing. He's so well-versed, he has such a great understanding of cinema. . . .

"That's often the way with first-time directors - they are so nervous about being unprepared that they actually are always the best prepared.. . . There never was a moment where I was thinking, 'Oh God, you've never made a film before!' "

True love ways. Get ready to hear a lot of noise about a quiet little New York story, Love Is Strange. Directed and co-written by Ira Sachs, it stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a couple who, after years of living together, decide to make their partnership official. They get married. But in the celebratory moment's aftermath, Molina's George, a choirmaster for a Catholic school, loses his job - gay marriage runs counter to church doctrine. The men are forced to sell their apartment and temporarily take up with friends (Molina) and family (Lithgow). Their relationship is put to the test.

"I've decided that the film is like Love Story, or Titanic," says Sachs on a recent visit to Philadelphia. "It's that structure. It's a couple that are very much connected that have to face an external dilemma, and we learn about their love - it reveals itself - through how they confront that problem."

Sachs doesn't rehearse his actors, and so, while shooting Love Is Strange last year, every day proffered new surprises: the small gestures, the intuitive moments, of Lithgow, Molina, Marisa Tomei, and his other stars.

"If I wasn't a director, the only other job I might have been able to do would be a psychoanalyst," he says with a smile. "On set, I'm extremely attentive to what's going on. . . . But that said, the one thing that is better than I could have possibly hoped for is the history that Lithgow and Molina create as a couple - it feels historically real, emotionally accurate."

Love Is Strange opens Friday at the Ritz Bourse and Carmike at the Ritz Center/NJ.

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