Cinema: ‘Gritty’ modern, adaption of The Selfish Giant
FROM the earliest days of feature length documentaries, through the celebrated British New Wave of gritty ‘kitchen sink’ movies (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and the like), British cinema has a long and illustrious tradition of social realist cinema. With directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh continuing the tradition, this is a cinema with a commitment to the experiences of the ordinary, the marginalised, and those whose worlds are otherwise invisible.
Scene from The Selfish GiantWith directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh continuing the tradition, this is a cinema with a commitment to the experiences of the ordinary, the marginalised, and those whose worlds are otherwise invisible.
The tradition has both a political commitment to its protagonists – the consequences of poverty, brutality, or exclusion, for example – but also a belief in the exceptional dramatic and emotional resonance of stories about life on the margins. A new generation of filmmakers has enthusiastically continued in the same vein, including Clio Barnard, whose first film as director was the acclaimed The Arbor. Here she takes a children’s fable of the same name by Oscar Wilde, using it as a point of departure, and moving it to a desperately impoverished Bradford housing estate.
Thirteen year-old friends, Arbor and Swifty, don’t seem to fit in anywhere and are excluded from school, left to their own devices and fending for themselves. They discover that serious money can be made dealing in scrap metal, a trade that leads them to a very dodgy dealer known as Kitten. He recruits the boys to scavenge for him, paying no mind to the potentially perilous consequences. Kitten also has a curious side-line raising ponies that he races in insanely dangerous harness races, on roads shared with motor vehicles. When Kitten recognises Swifty’s skill with animals, and favours him with looking after the ponies, he comes between the boys, forcing Arbor into more single minded and risky metal scrounging. This is heartbreaking, passionate, exhilarating, almost Dickensian, and sometimes blackly comic film making, with bleak urban landscapes of deprivation made strangely beautiful. A huge success with audiences and critics.
SOURCE: Contributed by Catriona Gilmore
