I suppose the big question in this film is do the characters have any kind of self determination, or are they always bound to be victims of the social forces into which they were born? Jud commits his small act of murder out of resentment of the life he feels forced into: that of being a miner. Billy is just the scapegoat for this anger, really. Loach gives us hope in this film when Billy trains the kestrel and finds joy in that: here Billy is acting outside the confines of his narrow, bullied life. But are we meant to take his subsequent loss of the bird as an inevitable consequence of the life he leads: was someone bound to kill his treasure because the life he's been allotted is one where he really has no chance of rising above his circumstances? It is nicer to believe he might find and train another bird, or learn to fly on his own (the metaphor the story suggests), but this is not the mood at the film's end. We feel Billy's had his one chance, and that's it. In most of Loach's films we don't even get this brief moment of hope, which is perhaps why Kes is the best he made.
Review of Kes
