#162: Ratcatcher

(Lynne Ramsay, 1999)

Lyrical, perfectly paced, and deeply moving, Ratcatcher is the kind of film that Criterion has the potential to expose to a wider audience. Lynne Ramsay, who has only made one other movie, the glacially paced and questionably plotted Movern Callar, created with Ratcatcher not just a fascinating depiction of life in Glasgow in the 1970s, when a garbage strike littered the streets with bags of trash, but an immediately recognizable portrait of childhood's resiliency.

I was thinking two things while watching the film. The first was that, like Ballad of a Soldier, Ratcatcher was an essential kind of cinema: the high tourist travelogue. High tourism gives one a sense of the place as it is really lived, as opposed to low tourism, which reinforces the tropes already associated with a place. Ratcatcher, like George Washington, or City of God, or Atarnarjuat, or even the severely flawed Gummo, is a highly stylized but nevertheless authentic depiction of a place in time, one the viewer most likely has never been and most likely will never go. Yet we feel like we have been there after the film, we understand what motivates the people from those places, and finally, we understand that they are a lot like us.

This is the second thing I kept thinking as I was watching the film: as hard as life was for James, the lead character in the film, his attitude and desires didn't seem that different from my own growing up. We all struggle with the same difficulties reconciling our emotions and dreams with the world around us - that's what childhood is at its most basic form. It's not that I had it as hard as James; obviously, that is far from the case, and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. It's that the world we are born into is the only world we know, and it's the inherent resiliency of childhood which makes us all the same. Some of us succumb to our hardships, others rise above them (and depending on your reading of the ending, James might be either of these). But we all go through the same process, the struggle to hold onto the dreams of our youth and build a real life around them.

Looking over comments and essays about the movie, I was not surprised to see that the most talked about scene in the film was the scene of James climbing through the window at the half finished house that his family will most likely never move into and running through a wheat field, basking in the sun. It is the most striking scene not just because of the photography's change in both tone and texture (this is a beautiful film, by the way), but because of the contrast between James sleepwalking through his life and his moments of bliss in the field.

It is another scene that moved me, though. James's friend Kenny takes his mouse and ties him to a balloon in order to let him float up to the moon, and the result calls to mind the earliest moments of imagination in cinema and in childhood, those pristine ideas that everything is going to be different once we learn how to fly.