Ratcatcher (1999) dir. by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews and William Eadie

***

By Blair Stewart

Being a child of the '80s I was deprived of first-hand experiences of the previous decade, but one impression left with me from the '70s is garbage. Rotten, stinking, fetid, obese black plastic bags plump with vermin, spilling their messy guts out of city dustbins over every street. That's the imagery I've taken away from Western cinema during the period with Scorsese's 1976 Manhattan buried under trash (both figuratively and literally) in Taxi Driver, and a refuse-strewn London in the grip of public-works strikes and punk anarchy in Julien Temple's ode to the Sex Pistols with The Filth and the Fury.

Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsay's own turbulent life experiences included a 1973 sanitation strike while growing up in working class Glasgow. And by 'working class' I mean the dwellers of housing estates, the odourless British euphemism for ghettos. Against the backdrop of poverty Ramsay colours her 1999 near-autobiographical roughneck debut with streaks of childhood bewilderment to salve young James's (William Eadie) dire existence atop playground trash piles.

Da (Tommy Flanagan of Sons of Anarchy recognition) is an unrepentant drunkard through-and-through, while Ma (Mandy Matthews) is tenuously holding her family together with the older sister in the micro-skirt sneaking off for carnal knowledge. Just below their eye line wee James will gain an understanding of death as his playmate drowns in the local open sewer - a more terrible form of adult knowledge known than his elder siblings. The guilt spins James away from his family towards the used neighbourhood bike's comforting arms and the empty outskirts of the city where a better life might come with the construction of nicer housing estates for all. Not exactly the stuff of Wonder Years, but an honest take on systemic rot, and despite a false note in the final scenes, often a superb one.

By occasionally using surreal mise-en-scène Ramsay strips away the brutal reality of U.K. kitchen sink/working class drama covered in the works of Loach, Leigh and Clarke from the protagonist's eyes as he grasps onto his innocence. Ramsay's cast is excellent but nearly unintelligible, their Glaswegian brogue impossible to my Canadian ear, which is saying something since my Mom comes from a bunch of thick old Weegies. Regardless of necessary subtitles, the actors are well chosen and appear as suited to their surrounding in front of the camera as desperate Hollywood starlets in search of spiritual enlightenment in India aren't to theirs.

According to the hallowed annals of the IMDB most of the actors in Ratcatcher haven't made another film, which is a damn shame based on the results. Thankfully, after an eight-year hiatus, Lynne Ramsay returned with last year's controversial We Need to Talk About Kevin.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) dir. by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller

***

By Blair Stewart

Tilda Swinton faces terrible labours as a mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay's beautifully flawed return after her 2002 masterpiece Morvern Callar.

To Eva (Swinton), her first child Kevin (played at various stages through youth by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller) is not a welcome addition to the tidy life she keeps with husband Franklin (John C. Reilly). From an early age the child plays sides between his parents effortlessly, with Eva usually holding the losing hand during the potty-training and spelling lessons stages. We see from her splintered memories of Kevin's upbringing the irksome stare he commands in diapers at a tender age, as if the boy is channelling Vincent D'Onofrio's Pvt. Pyle from Full Metal Jacket.

Kevin acts like a little monster, but surely most kids can be bastards in the playground sandpit. Kevin's ambiguity as a major brat/minor sociopath is out of his mother's grasp, and the film jumbles up Eva's past with her raw present as a subjective bookend to the tragedy of Van Sant's Elephant. Could we be seeing the sum of her mistakes as a parent that lead to disaster, or did she do all that was within her power to steer her supposedly loved child from his deeds?

This is Swinton's film, as the camera locks on her face like sunlight through a magnifying glass baking a crippled ant. There is a moment early on in which Swinton, with a look to an off-screen character, accomplishes more with her silence than pages of superfluous dialogue could possibly accomplish. All that cauterized emotion comes right out of her eyes, and she really is one of the great actors working today. On point and a coup for Ramsay is Billy Hopkins' casting of Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin skulking about the house. In Millers’ uniqueness, Ramsay chooses to indulge in fetish-like close-ups of his shredded skin and open pores like an insect in the pupa stage, a kind of grotesqueness that would fit well with the fleshy horrors of Cronenberg.

While We Need to Talk About Kevin is heavy material to digest, with the mesmerizing and unexpected opening to the framing of Kevin's actions, it's skillfully made throughout. There's been much acclaim for this film thus far here at Cannes. Where I differ is in the non-linear structure of the story that saps the work of tension. By the middle half of the film, I wasn't engaged with the events as much as I was watching a rockslide gain momentum where the end results were fairly obvious. There's also the niggling issue of why Eva would stay in a town of often broad American caricature in which she is a pariah akin to that of Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, but just as well she could be carrying a mother's great burden into extremity.

Kevin is a powerful view at the nasty before and after of accumulated mistakes.