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Lynne Ramsay's first feature is a harrowingly beautiful tale of
adolescence that deepens and refines the themes articulated in her three
award-winning shorts. Much like American director David Gordon Green's
contemporaneous debut, George Washington (US, 2000), Ramsay's film is concerned
with the subjective experience of childhood and its relation to death amid urban
decay - against the backdrop of 1973's crippling Glasgow dustmen's strike.
Ratcatcher, however, is contemplative rather than didactic, hijacking the
British tradition of social realism and steering it into uncharted and
distinctly poetic waters.
One body of water in particular - a forbidding local canal - provides an
anchor for the impressionistic and episodic narrative and holds a mysterious
attraction for the young protagonist, James Ramsay. The water's murky surface
marks a tenuous boundary - between life and death, innocence and experience - to
which James constantly returns. In the bold opening sequence, James is secretly
implicated in the accidental drowning of a neighbourhood playmate. The scar this
incident leaves only makes the awkwardness of emerging adolescence more acute,
from the disinterested father who insists on buying the sensitive, unathletic
lad football shoes to the older girl who befriends James by placing his hand on
her leg.
Taking her cue from still photography, Ramsay hones her narrative in its
moments of inactivity, in their potential for movement. Time seems to slow for
James, and pangs of discovery intermingle joy with sadness, as when his fingers
touchingly examine his sleeping mother's toe, suggesting poverty by poking out
through an old nylon. It is also with the patience of a photographer that Ramsay
approaches her subjects. Her family scenes breathe with a rare naturalness, and
her direction of children allows for their irritating qualities, making them
wholly un-irritating. A willingness to spend time with her complex, broken
characters - especially James' Da - rather than relying on thumbnail
illustrations, is what grants the often grim Ratcatcher its moments of sublimity
and grace.
In the film's ambiguous conclusion, Ramsay confers upon her child hero the
same measure of redemptive grace, allowing us to see through his eyes. The canal
finally claims him beneath its reflective surface, but in his mortality he sees
an exultant vision. The earth and slate tones of the slum fall away and an
ordinary housing development by a field becomes a paradise of promise. The
viewer is lifted with James in the hope of a better world to
come.
Dominic Leppla *This film is the subject of a BFI Film Classics book by Annette Kuhn.
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