|
The Selfish Giant
| Released |
25 October 2013 |
| Director |
Clio Barnard |
Starring
|
Conner Chapman, Shaun Thomas, Ralph Ineson, Ian Burfield, Everal A. Walsh, Sean Gilder, Lorraine Ashbourne, Elliott Tittensor, Rebecca Manley |
| Writer(s) |
Clio Barnard |
| Producer(s) |
Tracy O'Riordan |
| Origin |
United Kingdom |
| Running Time |
91 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama |
| Rating |
15A |
|
|
Same old beat.
The kitchen sink is alive and well. But despite a bleak post-industrial setting, Clio Barnard’s updated version of Wilde’s classic fairytale rises above political diatribe by melding together two contradictory genres; fairytales and social realism.
Barnard takes us into the savage, precarious world of a Bradford council estate; a community rife with social problems and grinding poverty, where people are airbrushed from the picture of contemporary society. The echoes of Loach are there (Kes in particular), but Barnard deftly uses humour and tenderness to bring us into the world of two boys forced to learn the hard way what it means to be an adult.
She also elicits incredible performances from her two young leads, Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas. They play Arbor and Swifty, two 13-year-old kids excluded from school and left to fend for themselves on the rough Northern estates. Battling ennui and struggling to survive, the boys fall in with local scrap dealer and sulky racer, Kitten, who manipulates them into scavenging bric à brac on horse and cart. But more dangerous hauls equal greater spoils, and soon Arbor begins to emulate Kitten by becoming greedy and exploitative. Meanwhile, Swifty’s developing affinity with horses leaves him disinterested in scrapping, and a rift begins to emerge in the friendship.
Barnard’s vernacular little film revels in the grit, grime and gully at every opportunity; each frame displaying something excluded and unloved. Even the deathly silent, emaciated ponies begin to resemble their owners. The boys make constant distinctions between “hard” and “soft”, failing to adapt to one or the other perhaps the difference between survival and despair, while the identity of the Giant lies ambiguous. Is it the brutal and manipulative Kitten, or indeed the looming pylons tempting desperate children to steal their illicit treasures? But in this, at times unrelentingly bleak world, Barnard finds poetic lyricism in the chemistry of her two leads; their relationship radiating with a palpable, kinetic energy. Arbor is foul-mouthed, truculent and abrasive. To the authorities, he’s simply another future ASBO to be pushed as far outside mainstream society as possible, but to Barnard he’s resourceful, hardworking, loyal to his friend and mother, with an (understandably) natural contempt for the Bobby.
A hauntingly visceral ending packs quite the gut-punch, but the real tragedy would be The Selfish Giant not finding the audience it deserves.
- Cathal Prendergast |
