Clio Barnard (2013)

The writer-director Clio Barnard’s new film is ‘inspired by’ the Oscar Wilde story of the same name.  The ‘keep out’ sign on the premises of the scrap metal dealer Kitten, a key character in the film, recalls the ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ notice on the giant’s wall in the story.   That notice is designed primarily to warn off children – children who transform the giant’s life in the original and are the principals in Barnard’s take on it.  Otherwise, I can’t see that Oscar Wilde has supplied more than a fine title.  The Selfish Giant seems to owe substantially more to Kes, with its theme of bleak schoolboy lives in Yorkshire being transformed by a passion involving animals, and the inevitability of an unhappy ending to this.  If you’ve made a first feature as formally innovative as The Arbor, there’s naturally a risk that a more conventional drama will be disappointing in comparison.  I had increasing feelings of anti-climax as I watched The Selfish Giant but I’ll still look forward to what Clio Barnard does next.

This film, like its predecessor, is set in a working-class area of Bradford.   Because the characters’ lives are impoverished and there’s naturalistic acting and lots of swear words and arguments, it’s bound to be praised as thoroughly truthful – although Barnard demonstrates that she’s not above resorting to the unlikely for effect:  for a start, the first name of one of her teenage protagonists – and the pivotal character – is, improbably, ‘Arbor’, emphasising that he’s the offspring of Barnard’s successful debut feature.   Skinny, tiny, blonde, cheeky Arbor and his antithetical sidekick Swifty – doughy, dark-haired, slow-witted – are excluded from school.   Swifty’s mother insists that, during the exclusion, he still turns up for school and her son sits each day, in his uniform, with the school secretary in the reception area – and without any teacher appearing to notice.  This is used simply as a set-up for Swifty to escape eyecatchingly when Arbor turns up at the school.  Clio Barnard is a fine image-maker, though.  It’s a cliché but she does create a glum poetry from the settings – punctuating the action with shots of horses or sheep in drab, humanless landscapes, power stations ghostly in the mist, electricity pylons against a beautiful sunset.

Horses and electricity play a central part in The Selfish Giant.  The film is set in the present day and the use of horses to pull carts of scrap metal seems antique but I assume this must be accurate.  Kitten, for whom the two boys go to work, also has a horse, Diesel, which he puts, and bets on, in trotting races.  Swifty has some experience with horses from his family background; his sure and sympathetic touch means that he’s transformed when he comes into contact with the animals.  Along with the prospect of making money, by picking up or stealing metal for which Kitten will pay, the horses are the main attraction for Swifty in working for the dealer.   For Arbor, the money is pretty well all that counts – but you’re certainly struck, and held, by how the two boys, both with unstable, angry home lives and submerged in boredom at school, are energised by getting into this world of work.   Barnard succeeds too in imparting this energy to the frequent shots of bits and heaps and mountains of scrap metal, making these more than an obvious representation of the debris of lives.   Galvanism of a more literal kind is the cause of both a rift between Arbor and Swifty and, not long after their partnership resumes, of Swifty’s death:  the boys are electrocuted one evening and on this occasion there’s no sunset to beautify the pylons.   I didn’t understand why it took so long for Arbor, who turns out to be unharmed, to regain consciousness.  It seemed as if this was what suited the director best, so that she could show a moon in a black sky, Arbor’s coming to consciousness in the dawn of the following day to discover Swifty’s corpse, and so on.

Some of the details of male adolescent behaviour are well observed – like the little, momentary scuffles between the boys on their way to school.  Other things are relatively pat and point-making – Arbor is fearlessly insolent with his teachers and the police but polite when Kitten’s wife, who hands out the cash the boys earn, is pleasant to him.  Conner Chapman has a strong screen presence as Arbor although he’s not always so convincing when he’s reading lines – I got the sense that Shaun Thomas as Swifty was the more natural actor.   The adults include Sean Gilder (Kitten), the reliably excellent Lorraine Ashbourne (Kitten’s wife), Steve Evets and Siobhan Finneran (Swifty’s parents), Rebecca Manley and Elliott Tittensor (Arbor’s mother and brother), and Ian Burfield and Ralph Ineson (two other men in the scrap metal world).

3 November 2013