Ken Loach got it right. Slums, slum schools, and a future so limited you might as well call it predestination and have done with it. I was dragged up in the industrial north of England and feel uncomfortable, so closely can I identify with what is portrayed in Kes.
This, mark you, in a film shot in a period generally regarded as prosperous, a period innocent of Thatcher and the way she systematically shut down the mines and the mining towns. In this it characterizes prosperity accurately: a strictly local phenomenon. Not, of course, local to the north of England.
The kestrel dies. This is the central fact of the film. The hope, the freedom, the escape that it represents so well is given a true measure (a truly limited one).
When commentators from London say that the film needs subtitles (because of the thick Yorkshire accents of the participants) they speak more truly than they know: it is, indeed, a film from another country. With the closure of the pits the black perspective offered by this movie all those years ago is, somehow, even steeper and even darker. All those young lads who were fodder for the coal mine are now, simply, fodder for the dole queue.
This always was a film I found painful to watch and, as the political economy of Britain has unfolded over the last couple of decades, it becomes ever more painful to see it. Not because it is a poor or a careless movie, but because it is a good and an accurate one!
This, mark you, in a film shot in a period generally regarded as prosperous, a period innocent of Thatcher and the way she systematically shut down the mines and the mining towns. In this it characterizes prosperity accurately: a strictly local phenomenon. Not, of course, local to the north of England.
The kestrel dies. This is the central fact of the film. The hope, the freedom, the escape that it represents so well is given a true measure (a truly limited one).
When commentators from London say that the film needs subtitles (because of the thick Yorkshire accents of the participants) they speak more truly than they know: it is, indeed, a film from another country. With the closure of the pits the black perspective offered by this movie all those years ago is, somehow, even steeper and even darker. All those young lads who were fodder for the coal mine are now, simply, fodder for the dole queue.
This always was a film I found painful to watch and, as the political economy of Britain has unfolded over the last couple of decades, it becomes ever more painful to see it. Not because it is a poor or a careless movie, but because it is a good and an accurate one!