Film
Ratcatcher
- Director
- Lynne Ramsay
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 97 mins
Lynne Ramsay’s 1999 feature debut wrongfoots the viewer from the start. In a deftly directed, elliptical sequence, we follow a boy called Ryan who goes to play with a mate in a Glasgow canal. They splash about a bit. Then Ryan drowns. We see his dead body lying on the pavement and a woman looking out of an upstairs window, sobbing. The other boy races up the stairs and hugs the woman. “I thought it was you,” she whispers.
It’s grim, it’s the mid-‘70s, and rubbish is piling up in the streets as a result of the refuse workers’ strike. The bins are infested with rats, the people are infested with nits, and the canal is so grossly polluted that those who fall into it so regularly end up with hideous scabs. The boy we’ve just seen is 12-year-old James (William Eadie). Nobody witnessed the drowning and we’re never sure whether James caused it, but he’s certainly implicated and scarred with guilt. He lives with his two sisters, useless drunken dad (Tommy Flanagan) and protective ma (Mandy Matthews) in a dilapidated, overcrowded tenement on an authentically depressing council estate. The family have applied for rehousing and James dreams of living in a house with a bath and toilet. Meanwhile, he forms an oddly touching friendship with 14-year-old Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), the local bicycle who’s drawn self-destructively to a bunch of older, crueller boys in much the same way that James continues to return to the canal. Then his other mate Kenny tumbles in, and before you can say “Oh my God – they’ve killed Kenny!” James’s dad dives in to rescue him, becoming an accidental hero in the process.
There are plenty of nods to early Ken Loach in both the dialogue and characters (notably the animal-loving Kenny), but Ramsay’s direction betrays a sensuousness and fascination with detail that owes rather more to Terence Davies. Occasionally, this works brilliantly. In one magical scene, James clambers aboard a bus in pursuit of his sister and rides as far as the driver will take him, Nick Drake’s gorgeous Cello Song playing on the soundtrack as the drab tenements give way to idyllic countryside. In another, the older boys encourage him to take his turn at ‘poking’ Margaret Anne, prompting him to simply lie on top of her protectively. But other fantasy sequences obstinately fail to gel and the parents’ relationship is all too familiar, adding little to that enduring arthouse favourite – the poverty-and-domestic-violence-among-the-proles yarn.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the Watershed’s epic Of Grudge and Gumption: British Working Class on Film Sunday brunch season.
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