RATCATCHER
Written and Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Plan B NR 94 min. subtitles
Lynne Ramsay's first feature is set in the grim and grimy world of Glasgow's public housing projects, during a garbage strike that has left the already bleak cityscape strewn with mountains of black plastic bags where rats swarm and children play. And yet it's not exactly about poverty. Ramsay's characters have food and shelter, decent clothing, telly, and dance records. They have a subsistence level of comfort. What they don't have is hope.
Ramsay, a former still photographer, begins her film with the almost still image of a little boy twisting inside a plastic shower curtain. It suggests a caul, or a shroud, or a ghost. The sound is muted, the action is in extreme slow motion, until the boy's mother cuffs him and tells him to stop messing with her shower curtain, and sends him outside to play. He meets a friend, James, they horse around in the shallow canal that runs by the projects, and a moment later he's drowned.
"That wasn't your main character," Ramsay is telling us, "this is your main character," and the next hour and a half deals with the forlorn, guilt-heavy existence of skinny, pinch-faced, jug-eared James (William Eadie). Or perhaps she's offering the thought that they're interchangeable, these children trapped in an environment from which there seems to be no escape.
But of course they're not interchangeable. James has little in common with the gang of thuggish older boys who pick on him and gang-bang the resigned, compliant 14-year-old Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen). But then James is still pre-adolescent; there's no telling what changes a few more years in the projects might bring.
His parents (Tommy Flanagan and Mandy Matthews) have had a few more years in the projects, though they're still young. Their dream is to get out of the projects - into new projects which are being built in a wheat field on the edge of town. James finds his way there on a bus, and spends a rapturous afternoon exploring the half-finished apartments and imagining, a scene reminiscent of the Joad children at the model camp in The Grapes of Wrath. But eventually, of course, urban sprawl will encompass the new buildings and drag them down, and future generations will plot and dream to escape them.
Ramsay has a wonderful eye and ear for her characters, and a gift for imagery. Unfortunately much of the movie is dark, murky, groping its hand-held way through impenetrable shadows. But she sketches her story without pathos, and without heavy-handed symbolism. Water serves as a vehicle for casual death. It's also the setting for a lovely scene where James and Margaret Anne take a bath together, as comfortable and unerotic as an old married couple. And it provides a moment of heroism for James's Da, who rescues a boy from drowning, gets a medal, and probably messes up his family's chances for the new housing project. The boy he saves is a simpleminded friend of James's who, amidst the swarming vermin of the garbage strike, gets a pet white mouse for his birthday, and sends it on a strange trip.
Ratcatcher is spoken in an urban Scots brogue so thick that the filmmakers have wisely subtitled it in English, reminiscent of an early Ken Loach film like Kes.
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