Death, guilt, and despair plague the characters of Scottish
film-maker Lynne Ramsay. In the three feature films she has made and in the
couple of shorts, dialogues are sparsely used. Her visual language is
lyrical & bold, and through sharp sound & production design, she fabricates a hellish world. The directorial touches remind us of Terrence Malik,
Bill Douglas, and Terrence Davies, although the way Ramsay efficiently uses the
fragmented narrative diffuses a feeling of watching an original work. Ramsay’s movies
will be disliked by those expecting readily apparent images, since her
narrative tracks down the profound, unresolvable feelings of the central character. While
the director’s debut feature Ratcatcher (1999) might have written from
personal, childhood experiences, her next two features were based on novels
(“Morvern Callar” & “We Need to Talk about Kevin”). In a Lynne Ramsay
movie, every bad thing that could happen to the protagonist would have happened
before or at the start of the film. The script from then on would explore the
aftermath of this ‘bad incident’. Grief, guilt, and pointlessness of existence
would swell up within the central character, while a sense of optimism and
lyrical beauty would also co-exist.
“Ratcatcher” begins with a moment of poetic beauty. A young
12 year old boy from Glasgow wraps & spins his face on the drapes at his
house. The sun shines upon the white drapes and since the shot moves in
slow-motion, we get the feeling of watching an elegant balletic dance. But, it’s
suddenly interrupted as the mother pats on the boy’s head to stop playing with
her drapes. The boy moves out of the frame and the hanging fabric slowly
unfurls to its static position. Of course, at that point we don’t know the
foreboding nature of those visuals. A boy named Ryan Quinn watches his friend
James (William Eadie) playing near the foul-smelling canal at the back of their
apartment complex. James, on the brink of adulthood, plays a game that ends up bad. Few hours later, Quinn is found dead. He has drowned in that
canal. James is responsible for the accidental drowning. No one has
seen this accident, but the feelings of guilt latches onto his already fragile
self. James is a lanky boy who reminds
us of David Bradley’s Billy in “Kes” (1969). He lives in a dilapidated council
house, situated in a very tough and filthy neighborhood. His mother (Mandy
Matthews) is lovely woman, although his step-father (Tommy Flanagan) becomes
too abusive when he is drunk (which he is every evening). James has a distanced
relationship with his two step-sisters (Michelle Stewart and Lynne Ramsay Jr.).
The story is set in the 1970’s and on a particular time
period when Glasgow’s bin men went on an extended strike. The film gives a very
realistic look of how the city’s project housing facilities looked and smelled at
that time. In many sequences, we cringe by looking at the rats that freely move
through the gathered trash, mounted in front of the apartments. Eventually, the
government brought in soldiers to remove at least 39,000 tons of trash, in
& around Glasgow after the imminent threat of serious health hazards. After
showing the barely hanging familial threads, we get to see James’ small circle
of acquaintances, who are all mostly heartless bullies. James shows concern for
a teenage girl Margaret (Leanne Mullen) and a mentally challenged boy named Kenny. With
Margaret he develops a kind of graceful, tentative relationship. However, apart
from the feelings of guilt involving Ryan Quinn, he also feels guilty about his
powerlessness to help Margaret from the local bullies. In the course of narrative,
Margaret is repeatedly sexually abused by the tough teenage boys. James does
possess the dream of breaking away from this casually cruel reality. He lives
that dream for few hours when he escapes on a public bus to a new housing
development under construction, which is situated near a large field of golden
grass. James joyously jumps, runs, and rolls through the grass. He expects that
the council men would allocate those houses for their family. But, can he
totally heal his self that’s drowning under guilt and move away from the
plagued atmosphere?
Ramsey’s cinematographer Alwin Kuchler and her production
designer Jane Morton have worked in the director’s short films, whom she met
when she was a film student. The three of them had precisely imbued a tone of
poetic realism. While the grainy quality and muted grey palette conveys the
hard social realism, there are arresting, truly magical moments. The frames are
watchful of the movements but they are non-judgmental so as to include
humanity. Since the film is a meditation on a community seen through the eyes
of a 12 year old boy, the fluid, creative visual works fends off the
inherent depressive tone in the script. May be some of the images are
diffused with obvious artiness. But the inexplicable emotions she raises within
us through the artistically pure frames are commendable. For example, we see
the two kids (Jamie and his younger sister) lying down on the couch, embracing
each other. The image unconsciously works on our emotions, gives a sense of
happiness, but we can’t seem to pin-point the reasons. In another scene, where
Jamie shares the space with troubled teen Margaret, we see them naked in the
bathtub, scrubbing each other’s hair with soap. However, the sequence is staged
in a way that’s devoid of titillation. We could rather feel the tenderness
existing between these two drowning souls. The recurrent visual motif of
drowning plus the images of black trash bags and fetid canal symbolizes the
inner pressures confronted by Jamie.
Perhaps, the most powerful aspect of the film is its
portrayal of poverty. Director Ramsay views childhood as a rich experience, but
persistently notes how the childhood is disfigured by the rampant
impoverishment. The teenagers act like monsters, while children acts like
adults. In one of the film’s very distressing scene, we see army men clearing
away the rubbish as gang of children kill the rats inside the trash bags and
wave the dead rats at each other. In another, the teens gang up on the
dim-witted kid Kenny to make him kill his pet white mouse. The powerful
observation of this behavior makes a comment on how the blighted world these
children live in impacts their nature. If the film feels little disjointed or
episodic, may be it’s because of Ramsay’s less success in depicting the adults
behind the children of this society. The behavior of adults, for the most part, offsets the sense of beauty and tenderness felt in the frames. The
narrative’s cruelties are escalated in an inorganic manner in the final potions
(like the sexual abuse, slashing, and domestic tension) with a sole aim to push
to the seemingly ambiguous ending. While we continuously experience the profound
horrors faced by Jamie, the final act slowly drifts to the predictable
territory. The performances are uniformly excellent, especially that of the two
youngsters – Eadie and Leanne Mullen.
Trailer
Ratcatcher (94 minutes) intensely visualizes the bleak
collapse of a society. Its beauty and strength lies in the way it transcends
that bleakness to contemplate on the possibility of hope within the souls,
dwelling in such an impoverished atmosphere. The imagery boasts a beguiling
lyricism which may not impress viewers expecting verbal storytelling approach.
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