Little Voice

Abstract

In a seaside resort in the North of England, middle-aged woman Mari Hoff is sleeping off a heavy night out on the drink. All of a sudden, she is woken up by very loud music coming from her daughter LV’s (Little Voice; Laura) bedroom. From Mari’s reaction, we can see that this is a regular occurrence, and she is not at all happy about it. In her bedroom, LV has a pile of old records from singers of times gone by. This morning, she is listening to the song Come Fly with Me as she sorts out her records, putting them into piles, cleaning them and so on. In this scenario, alone and listening to old music, LV is happy, which contrasts to how she acts when she is with other people and out of her comfort zone — her dramatic problem. The song itself is also important because it symbolizes the arc that LV will undergo throughout the film, and sets up the recurring imagery of birds and flying that echoes her emotional journey from shy and introverted to more confident and able to speak out. This idea is further accentuated when we then see intercutting shots of her and Billy, a young man who keeps pigeons in a coop and who is trying to get the pigeons to come for their feed. One of them, Dwaine, is missing. In this sequence, the physical object of the cage becomes important, representing LV’s feelings of being trapped (by her mother) and functioning as a recurring symbol to chart her emotional journey.