Le géant égoïste

The Selfish Giant is an interesting watch-gritty, heartfelt, and beautifully shot, with powerful performances from its young leads. There's a rawness to it that feels authentic, and the friendship at its centre is touching in that bruised, kitchen-sink way. But as much as I wanted to be moved, something about it felt a bit... manipulative. Like it knew exactly how to push the poverty-porn buttons. It lingers on the hardship in a way that sometimes feels more exploitative than empathetic. I admired the craft, but I left it feeling more wrung out than enriched. Worth seeing, but not life-changing.

The Selfish Giant shows basically how capitalism works: not by making an academic movie with statistical figures, but by telling the highly capturing dramatic story of two teenagers in an English community who need to collect scrap to make ends meet.

They are no longer motivated in studying, because the bills need to be payed by the end of the month. At school they are expelled because of their frustrated behavior. Their family is in ruin due to the stress caused by not earning enough money.

In their quest for scrap they see how the best thief's also gain the most money. So eventually they turn to criminal behavior. Not by choice, but by necessity. Making money becomes separated from doing 'the right thing' to do.

The director does a good job not telling this as a straight forward moral tale, nor using sentimental 'tricks', nor trying to pretend that all ends well. But telling it as an illustration on a human level in an ordinary community where the downside of our economic model is not theory but reality.

A story of dependence, damage and desperation, told with grit and grimy frankness. It's also a portrait of friendship born of need and emptiness, on the road to nowhere. The tone of documentary accuracy makes the film even darker.

Much of the movie is hard to bear, yet it never drags, thanks to the momentum that writer and director Clio Barnard finds in the fable, and, above all, to the energy that she unleashes in her young leads, Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas.

The first great fiction film to be released in 2014, Clio Barnard's second feature, "The Selfish Giant," is breathtakingly assured, ruggedly beautiful, moving and justifiably tragic.

I have to confess I have a 'soft spot' for realist British drama and any film featuring scrapyards and neglected locations nearly always gets a high rating for me.

Having seen Clio Barnard's previous film 'The Arbor' a couple of years back, I was curious to see her next feature and it's well worth the price of admission. Her style and subject matter here remind me of Andrea Arnold's 'Fish Tank' and also a little of Rufus Norris's dysfunctional family in 'Broken', both of which were high on my score sheet.

The two young leads are outstanding, even if their strong northern accents are sometimes hard to follow for me, a southerner, and the portrayal of exclusion, its consequences and repercussions is handled brilliantly by the film makers as you are immersed in their world for what feels far longer than the 90 minutes running time.

See it and appreciate that British drama is alive and kicking. I look forward to her next project.

In the Giant's garden in Oscar Wilde's children's story The Selfish Giant, it is always winter. Having built a wall to keep children from playing in his garden, there are no longer any peach trees, flowers, or birds, only perpetual hail and snow. Spring has forgotten this garden as it also seems to have forgotten the industrial town of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England, the setting for Clio Barnard's authentic and visceral The Selfish Giant. Nominated for a BAFTA award for Best British Film of 2013, The Selfish Giant is in the tradition of Ken Loach, Shane Meadows and others, films of social realism that show the world there is more to merry old England than Stratford-on-Avon and Westminster Abbey.

Though the film is about economic and social dysfunction, it is not all grim. Even in the metallic gray of the rotting town as captured by cinematographer Mike Eley, scenes of horses grazing in a tranquil field, oblivious to the surrounding train tracks and power lines, add a touch of timeless beauty. The real standout, however, are the remarkably convincing performances of Arbor (Conner Chapman) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas), 13-year-old best friends whose connection is born out of their desperate need for affection. Arbor, a pint-sized, hyperactive, sharp-tongued ADHD sufferer, lives with his mother (Rebecca Manley) and older brother (Elliott Tittensor) who sells his A.D.H.D. medication to pay off his drug debts. His father is nowhere to be seen.

"They sleep on the living room sofas but are better off than Swifty who lives with his eight siblings in a home lacking in the means to support them. Swifty's mother played by Siobhan Finneran, is caring, though she is intimidated by her overbearing husband (Steve Evets) who supports the family by renting furniture from discount stores and selling them for cash at inflated prices." Struggling to keep his aggressive behavior in check, Arbor relies on the heavy-set Swifty, a kinder gentler soul with a love for horses to calm him down. Banned from school as a result of fighting to defend themselves against bullies, the boys use a horse and cart to scavenge scrap metal, pots and pans, as well as copper cabling from telecom, railway, and power utilities.

To earn money to help support their families, they sell the scrap to an exploitative but fatherly local junk dealer (Sean Gilder), incongruously called Kitten but given to bursts of anger. In one of the visual highlights of the film, an illegal harness drag race is run on a major highway with serious money at stake. Recognizing Swifty's way with horses, Kitten offers to let him ride one of his horses in the next race. Feeling his friend drifting away from him, Arbor concocts a potentially lucrative plan to steal or collect electrical power cables, but the adventure leads to unforeseen consequences. Much of the dialogue without subtitles is indecipherable due to the heavy Yorkshire accents, but consists mostly of non-stop swearing anyway.

What does come through loud and clear, however, without the need for subtitles is the closeness of the boys' friendship. Although they have different temperaments, they are connected by a struggle for survival and a drive to preserve whatever joy is left in their childhood. There are definitely economic and political overtones in The Selfish Giant, yet it is not about politics or even selfishness, in spite of the title. It is a film with a human element at its core and we care about the characters as Barnard obviously does as well. According to the director, the film "is about what we have lost…and what we need to value and hold on to." It is also a film about the resilience of two boys determined to avoid becoming objects like the discarded scrap they collect.