Absolutely Fantastic

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

When I last visited Glasgow I thought the city was a lot more vibrant, respectable even glamorous than the griminess depicted in Ratcatcher.Lynne Ramsay's film is set in 1973 Glasgow where rubbish is being piled up because of the dustbin men strike. There is sordidness in the council tenements, rats, lice, dirty canals, drunken men and feral kids.Twelve year old James (William Eadie) yearns for a world out of this neighbourhood. In fact a bus ride to the edge of a city among fields shows him what is possible, maybe for the first time in the middle of nowhere where a new estate is being constructed he has left the city behind him.James might be no saint himself. His school friend drowned while he was playing with him in the canal. Some of the older kids he hangs around with are bullies, they treat a teenage girl as a plaything. At least James finds some tenderness with her.This is a grim but haunting and poetic film. The story is not told in a straightforward narrative. Ramsay has an eye for visuals which suggests an inspiration from Terrence Malick. A sequence of a mouse going to space tied to a balloon uses music from Badlands. The film also has influences from Ken Loach's Kes and Truffaut's 400 Blows.

All the praise heaped on this film puzzles me. I found the cinematography to be beautiful, but the storyline, once established, droned on and on with no end in sight. That might have been the point, however. One positive is although it contains the stereotypical drunk father, at least he wasn't physically abusive. You are left with a general sense of pity for many of the characters, but the mood is passive. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be appalled by the poverty or accepting of it. I think the director failed to connect the characters, and in turn kept the audience from connecting. The ending was a leaden mishmash of fantasy and overt symbolism. Not recommended. I understand that this film is semi-biographical, but I felt left out in the cold.

Ratcatcher utterly surprised me. Not because of the talking, which I hardly understood at all (I'm Austrian), but because of the surprising scarcity of dialogues. I doubt that there was a single situation where any of the protagonists talked for more than five seconds in a row. That's why the movie wasn't that difficult to grasp, as most of the plot was primarily carried by images and stunning shots of William Eadie's character. I guess that there were minutes where no-one actually said a word for a long time - which makes this movie maybe the movie with the least words spoken I've ever seen. Concerning its plot - it's very much reminiscent of Kes. You get a first-hand insight into the bleak and dull existence those kids in Glasgow have to endure. James is suffering from thorough disillusion. The sequences when you actually see him smile - which are two or three maybe - are thus real highlights of the movie. He is the one who bears the emotional burden of the movie. I particularly liked the scene when he was lying on the sofa and his young sister places herself next to him. The other highlight was when he took the bus and found this solitary house and the grain field, where he experienced some kind of relief from his tough life. The ending was ambiguous. I suppose he actually did drown himself - and the last image show his dreams of his family moving away from their bleak existence towards a brighter future - a future he thinks is only possible without him. Just think of the young girl holding the Miro towards the sky - and then you see James' face. And you see him drown again right when the credits start.

The demolition of the Glasgow tenements marked the end of one chapter in the story of poverty in that city; and sadly, the start of another one, as the bleak new schemes that replaced them soon fell into their own downward cycle. Lynne Ramsay's film, 'Ratcatcher', is an utterly unsentimental portrait of those times, though imbued with a measure of hope that only hindsight proves false. As a chronicler of Britain's working classes, Ramsay's style falls somewhere between the realism of Ken Loach and the artistry of Terrence Davies, although arguably lacking the warmth of either. Moreover, at times 'Ratcatcher' seems stylistically overloaded for no particular purpose (the strange fantasy scene with the mouse, for example, seems out of place in the rest of the movie), while when the film gets it right (such as in the opening scenes, which are almost unwatchably harrowing), it's still unclear for what higher aim Ramsay is putting her audience through the emotional wringer. Perhaps if the film was a little less "arty", more conventionally narrative-driven, and with more obvious sympathy, it might actually be more enjoyable to watch. On the other hand, most films which attempt to offer these conventional virtues end up formulaic, sterile and empty, whereas Ramsay's film is raw and in places very powerful. Taking this film together with 'Morvern Callar', her second feature, my feeling is that Ramsay is a director of considerable talent, but maybe still trying, in this early phase of her career, a little too hard. 'Ratcatcher' is not a great film; but hopefully hints at a great one to come.