To rise above the scrap heap

Denizens of Northern England’s depressed Bradford estates and children of wildly dysfunctional families—one broken and bereft of patriarch, the other teeming and tyrannized by a drunken dad who pawns the family sofa to pay the light bill—Arbor (Conner Chapman) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas) may be victims of a lopsided and neglectful social disorder, but any of us, however better off, should be so lucky as to have friends as loyal and loving at such a tender age. From its opening images of horses under stars, reactors looming in the mist and seemingly endless rows of low-income housing, The Selfish Giant plants us firmly in its milieu—yet it emphasizes that milieu’s battered poetry as much as its struggle and misery.

Arbor and Swifty—what brilliant names—sprout from this soil, the former diminutive and wiry, sporting a goofy haircut, garbed in dirty and torn clothing, compulsively kicking and screaming much of the time, the latter taller and portly, well-groomed and habitually polite, inclined to gentler gestures and a natural with animals, horses most especially. Early in the film the pair get expelled from school for fighting and cheerfully assume their new vocation as scrap men, collecting odds and ends and selling them to the ironically named Kitten (Sean Gilder), a sort of fury-prone and foul-mouthed Fagan figure who runs a vast scrap yard and participates in the local illegal horse-and-harness races. It’s Kitten who turns his junior gleaners on to copper wire, which fetches a mint by their standards, but which must be swiped from rail yards and utility trucks, and, most precariously, powers lines and underground cables. All of which promises even more trouble than the boys are already in. And while Arbor and Swifty’s fiercely loyal friendship is the silver lining in The Selfish Giant’s ever-present dark clouds and roiling fog, Kitten’s favoritism toward Swifty, whose talent with horses he hopes to exploit for his racing hobby, threatens to cause a rift which the volatile and under-medicated Arbor is all too ready to widen. 

This second feature from conceptual artist-turned-filmmaker Clio Barnard, whose truly remarkable debut, The Arbor (2010), was also set in the mean suburban streets of Bradford, is loosely based on the Oscar Wilde fairytale of the same name, yet it feels like lived experience. (In fact, the characters of Arbor and Swifty were drawn from a couple of neighbourhood boys hanging around during production on The Arbor.) The Selfish Giant perfectly balances qualities rarely combined to such effect in British social realism: it is compassionate without ever resorting to the sentimental; gritty while exuding craft and roughhewn beauty. All of which, along with the film’s sympathies and Swifty’s affinity for animals, bring to mind Ken Loach’s Kes (1969). Which should in no way prompt one to regard The Selfish Giant as any kind of throwback. It is grounded in timeless themes and in some ways feels drawn from myth, but this is very much a film of the here and now. And Barnard, inventive and intelligent yet full of heart, is quite obviously an artist with a bright future.  

                            

Flying in a pocket of silence: Kes on DVD

Early in Kes (1970) Billy Casper declares that he will not grow up to work in the coal mine that consumes droves of Barnsley lads, his big brother Jud included, like so much grist for the mill. Yet even in this first scene Billy could almost be “in the pit” already, sharing a twin-sized bed with the bullying, loutish Jud in a cramped, fatherless flat in the cold gloom of an early Northern England morning. Based on Barnsley-born Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel For a Knave (1968), produced by Tony Garrett and directed by Ken Loach, Kes, while unwaveringly focused on working-class marginality and crushed ambition, is not fundamentally pessimistic. Rather, its raison d’être lies in its authenticity, in granting its characters their due dignity by conveying their arduous lives and meager options for advancement with as much fidelity to the political realities of its era as possible.

If there’s a balm for deterministic despair in Kes it’s in the film’s warm and abundant humour, especially the scene where Billy, 15 but boyish and slight enough to slip in your backpack, attempts to let a book out from the local library, but having no membership and not wanting to wait to get his mum to sign the form claims, with utter deadpan, that he’s old enough to vote. It’s in the natural light, blue hues, gentle attentiveness and subtly lyrical camerawork of cinematographer Chris Menges. It’s in Barnsley boy David Bradley’s tremendous, artless central performance, in Billy’s tender relationship with the kestrel falcon he captures, tames and befriends, in the quiet promise of freedom Kes (as Billy dubs the bird) represents whenever she takes flight in the open spaces near Billy’s home, transforming her surroundings into a “pocket of silence” (evoked delicately through composer John Cameron’s solo flute passages) in which Billy can fleetingly take refuge from a life of abuse, neglect and outright dismissal. Kes achieves a balance rare in movies, rare even in the oeuvre of the British cinema’s most committed socialist auteur, Ken Loach: it’s at once adorable and unsentimental, endearing and appallingly brutal. It’s now available from Criterion.

Among the most valuable supplements in Criterion’s Kes are its subtitles (the Northern accents are doughy as Yorkshire pudding) and an earlier Loach-Garrett feature, the made-for-TV Cathy Come Home (1966). Employing jarring jump-cuts and abrupt aural transitions from dietetic dialogue to music to collages of commentary from a chorus of citizens and social workers (Loach was apparently gobbling up a lot of Godard in those days), this bracing docudrama exposes Britain’s postwar housing shortages via the deftly compressed story of a young Birmingham working-class couple. Limited job prospects, a work-related accident and a tendency to produce offspring snare the couple into increasingly punishing living conditions, Cathy’s bitchy mother-in-law’s tiny flat being far from the worst of them. Cathy Come Home is a harrowing condemnation of classist policies that was watched and discussed by millions during its original broadcast, though the issues it addresses regarding access to affordable housing remain urgent in cities here and elsewhere. It also reminds us what a loss it was that its remarkable lead actress Carol White’s career evaporated a few years later, the result, it seems, of bad habits, bad substances and bad relationships with famous men. She died in Florida in 1991 at the age of 48.