Ratcatcher (1999)

Lynne Ramsay is one of the most interesting contemporary directors, or so I think. I was impressed by the strangeness of Morvern Collar and her latest film, We Need to Talk about Kevin was both disturbing and eerily beautiful. When I start watching Racatcher - on an old, wheezing VHS-tape where the image is both grainy and unstable .... - I immediately recognize her style, her use of colors and her approach to film characters. Be prepared for a movie that is almost oppressingly bleak. Glasgow. Early seventies. A young kid plays with his friend by the canal, and the friend dies. The boy didn't do as much as he could, and afterwards, he fights with bad conscience. We follow him roaming around his neighborhood, a dilapidated housing area which is partly abandoned. He has two sister and a father who drinks. The world we look at is James' agonized world. One day James takes the bus to the end of the line. He walks around, looking at the houses. There is a field of wheat, almost surreal in its sheer existence, in its distinctive movements and colors. This is a quiet, stunning and dreamy scene which is important for the film as a whole. James is portrayed as an outsider kid, but he's got a friend, a girl who the local boys take advantage of. If you read this, you might shy away from all these depictions of urban misery. But if you know Ramsay's films, you know the quality of imagination there. Even though there are plenty of kitchen-sink realism, cruelty and loneliness in Ratcatcher, there is also a sense of amazement. In one scene, James' friend shows his pet mouse. The local gang takes the pet from him and starts playing with it, violently passing it around them to make it 'fly'. The friend ties the tail of the mouse onto a balloon, and the balloon flies up into the air, up to the moon, and the mouse explores the crevices of the moon together with an entire squadron of mice. This scene provides no consolation, but it expresses an aspect of sadness and hopelessness, it opens up another angle. Ramsay doesn't simply throw a heap of gloomy images at our face, she very skillfully and perceptively constructs a world which I immediately believe, I react to it, I learn to recognize and see different elements of it and Ramsay makes the viewer attends to the everyday regularities of life: the canal is there, the dustbins are there, the kids are playing over there. I think this is one of Ramsay's strengths - her understanding of place. Just to place her film in a broader context, I think a director like Terence Davies makes films which work on the same level as hers, and they both share a sense for the elegiac, the moments in which life both stops and brutally moves on. The film touches on political themes. There is a strike among the garbage men. The area is about to change entirely. But at the same time the film does not give away much hope for change - a feeling crystallized in the scene where James returns to the house he explored in the earlier scene with the weat field, only to find it locked. I would say that this political aspect of the film is not as developed as the more personal story about James, about being a child in a harsh world, about guilt and cruelty. The political remains a backdrop, but it is never explored as such.