O Lixo e o Sonho

I attended the screening of Ratcatcher in Glasgow as part of the Edinburgh Film festival where it was very warmly received. At times it is not an easy film to watch but it is hard not to relate to the struggle of the young boy at the centre of the story as he tries to make sense of his situation and to dream of an escape from squalor. The incident at the heart of the story and it's impact on the boy is developed in an understated way while never leaving you in doubt about it's devastating effect. The non-professional cast are uniformly excellent, particularly the boy playing the main character, and the film always feels rooted in the real lives of real people continually up against it. The humour and casual violence have considerable impact by being used sparingly and there are moments of great tenderness, particularly between the boy and an abused girl in his street. The film is set in Govan during the binmen's strike of the late seventies and it looks quite bleak yet the colours are deep and rich. This is a serious film with real depth and an exceptionally promising debut from Lynne Ramsey.

One of the best British films of the nineties, Ratcatcher is a powerful evocation of the uncertainty and surreal nature of childhood. The film also has something to say about family relationships, death, and the toll poverty takes on people (in this case, in the Glasgow of the seventies).

Although the film could be criticised for being fairly slow-paced, I think this is entirely missing the point. The film is more about atmosphere than a linear plot, and the lingering, intriguing glimpses it offers of the young character's life will stay in your memory like a particularly vivid dream.

I expect great things of Lynne Ramsay in the future.

"Ratcatcher" is a fairly auspicious debut for a young director. Lynne Ramsay has a powerful command of the visual aspects of filmmaking (dare I say it – approaching the poetic images of Tarkovsky) but her narrative authority is a lot less notable. This is a film in the manner of "Kes" but without the true humanity that that film had in spades. "Kes" is a masterpiece of social-realist humanism because the element of hope is never obvious but is always apparent; I think "Rosetta" is similar in this regard, too. But in recent Scottish cinema, in particular, there seems to be a masochist pleasure in dwelling on representing the worst kinds of poverty and despair, merely to serve a sensationalist agenda. In this respect I'm referring to films like "Small Faces", "Stella Does Tricks" and to a lesser degree "Trainspotting" (a film with other benefits overshadowing its gleeful focus on abject misery). This is an aspect of "Ratcatcher" which soon becomes wearying through the constancy of its emphasis – the images of garbage, vermin, filth and indigence becomes all consuming. But with that said, Ramsay's aesthetic approach is always interesting and at times incredibly poetic and beautiful. Some scenes of whimsical fantasy may seem laboured but they do lighten the load of the film's relentless social-realist agenda.

Well it's hard to say I loved a film like this, with so much darkness in the scenes and darkness in the script. And yet I did love this little dusky descent into childhood.

The waters of the hungry canal, ominous and omnipresent are set off nicely against the clearer, redemptive waters of baths throughout this film. William Eadie as James is tremendous throughout, most especially in his scenes with young John Miller's Kenny.

Unlike Mike Leigh's "All or Nothing" which I recently saw, this film I think had more than a little leavening in its bleak peak at the underclass. Despite rarely going ten minutes without a strong feeling of apprehension washing over me, there were enough warm flashes of affection to make this feel more like we were seeing people, and not statistics brought to life.

I'm not sure how Lynne Ramsay did it, but whenever the kids laughed, it felt genuine. It would have been interesting to be on the set. The interchanges between James and his Da made me think of animals, like a pack of lions and the eldest male just cannot do right by his father. Of course the father is flawed here, but thankfully it is not one of those television sitcom Dad's...devoid of any redemptive features.

The whole cast was tremendous really...from Tommy Flanagan's scarred sweet Da to the four schoolboys of the apocalypse to Lynne Ramsay Jr's transparent purity. Through the murkiness of the film, we can see the hope glimmering just below the surface, you only hope those characters in the film's flow can see it as well.

If you feel like I do that sorrow is an inescapable element to this world, but not one to be rinsed off and left far away from our dreams, cinematic and otherwise, I highly recommend you see this film. From the trajectory of Ramsay, Sr's shorts included on the DVD (and her take on Morvern Callar) I look forward, albeit with apprehension still, to her next work.

8/10

This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969), a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence. He has adolescent encounters, including an uneasy bath with an unpopular older girl, but he's very much a pre-adolescent child, with all the helplessness and vulnerability that that means. Lynne Ramsay's great strength as a filmmaker is an ability to recreate the world as seen through her characters' eyes. From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon. If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!