Ratcatcher

Plot synopsis:
The film opens focused upon James's friend Ryan Quinn, being forced to put on his wellington boots to go to visit his father, who is in jail. He'd rather play with James instead and runs off while his mother is not looking. Ryan meets James at the canal and during some rough-house play he is drowned, clearly with James bearing much of the blame for not having raised the alarm. James believes his inaction has gone unnoticed.
Ryan's family are eventually re-housed and on the day of leaving, Ryan's mother gives James the pair of brown sandals she had bought for Ryan on the day of his death.
The film follows the sensitive James as he tries to come to terms with his guilt, and make sense of the insensitive aspects of his environment.
His one escape comes when he takes a bus to the end of the line and ends up in the outskirts of the city, where a new housing estate is under construction. He explores the half-built houses, and wonders in awe at the view from the kitchen window: an expansive field of wheat, blowing in the wind and reaching to the horizon. In a scene central to the film, he climbs through the window and escapes into the blissful freedom of the field.
James befriends a girl, Margaret Anne, whom he tries to help after her glasses are thrown into the canal by the local gang. James and Margaret Anne become close friends. She is his only other relief from his home environment. She has problems of her own, allowing herself to be abused by the local gang. The two find comfort in each other's company.
One of James's friends, Kenny, receives a pet mouse as a birthday present. After the gang throw the mouse around to make him "fly", Kenny ties the mouse's tail to a balloon and we see it float to the moon, where it joins a whole colony of other mice frolicking on the moon.
The same friend later falls in the canal and is rescued by James's father, making him briefly into a local hero.
Though the military eventually comes and cleans up all the garbage in the neighbourhood, James realizes that his situation will most likely never change. He plunges himself into the canal, and we are shown a brief scene in which James's family is moving into a new neighbourhood.

Tags: romantic

Review:
i loved ramsay's ability to create intense and harsh situations without slipping into the provocative manipulation that is characteristic of many similar child starring films (think harmony korine).
The film is more about atmosphere than a linear plot, and the lingering, intriguing glimpses it offers of the young character's life will stay in your memory like a particularly vivid dream.
This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969), a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence.
From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon.
If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!.
RATCATCHER is a beautiful movie, though hard to watch because of the desperate conditions of its main characters.
Don't believe the whiners about this movie - it's NOT pretentious, it's inclusive and generous, and though it doesn't provide us with an easy let's-have-popcorn-and-watch-Schwarzenegger-blow-things-up kind of entertainment, it's well-crafted, well-written, beautifully shot, and worth watching and thinking about..
To reduce Ramsay to a filmmaker only dealing with social realism misses the entire point of her film, which is to reconstruct a narrative as it would appear to a young boy plagued with guilt over his involvement with the death of a friend.
At times it is not an easy film to watch but it is hard not to relate to the struggle of the young boy at the centre of the story as he tries to make sense of his situation and to dream of an escape from squalor.
The non-professional cast are uniformly excellent, particularly the boy playing the main character, and the film always feels rooted in the real lives of real people continually up against it.
There are moments in Lynne Ramsey's "Ratcatcher" that are powerful and affecting--the opening death/murder scene, the moments that follow; James' trip to his future house, his exhuberant play in the field behind.
Ramsey is talented at creating interesting, compelling images--the opening shot; the mouse tied to the balloon and his/her flight into space and crawling on the moon; James trip to his new house.
When i was little, other kids said i tied a mouse to a balloon and sent it to the moon, although it didn't really happen and the other kids were just twisting things for me, this is where lynne ramsay got the idea for the kid in the film who does the same, i knew lynne well, her brother james, who acts in the film was my very first friend as a small child at school, we grew up together though drifted apart.
Ratcatcher is a beautiful film set in the less aesthetically pleasing back drop drop of the Glasgow tenement blocks of the nineteen seventies.
The dream like quality as main protagonist James escapes his rat-infested urban home and escapes to the countryside are some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful scenes I have ever witnessed on film.
William Eadie as James is tremendous throughout, most especially in his scenes with young John Miller's Kenny.Unlike Mike Leigh's "All or Nothing" which I recently saw, this film I think had more than a little leavening in its bleak peak at the underclass.
Despite rarely going ten minutes without a strong feeling of apprehension washing over me, there were enough warm flashes of affection to make this feel more like we were seeing people, and not statistics brought to life.I'm not sure how Lynne Ramsay did it, but whenever the kids laughed, it felt genuine.
If you need a strong narrative line, this movie may not be for you (that seems to be the main complaint among the negative responses); otherwise, I highly recommend it, and expect great things of Lynne Ramsay.
Lynne Ramsay's film, 'Ratcatcher', is an utterly unsentimental portrait of those times, though imbued with a measure of hope that only hindsight proves false.
Moreover, at times 'Ratcatcher' seems stylistically overloaded for no particular purpose (the strange fantasy scene with the mouse, for example, seems out of place in the rest of the movie), while when the film gets it right (such as in the opening scenes, which are almost unwatchably harrowing), it's still unclear for what higher aim Ramsay is putting her audience through the emotional wringer.
Taking this film together with 'Morvern Callar', her second feature, my feeling is that Ramsay is a director of considerable talent, but maybe still trying, in this early phase of her career, a little too hard.
The act of escaping drowning acts as a metaphor for his escape from his life of squalor.Usually I like to talk about a film's story first  but it's difficult here as it doesn't really have one.
The only thing would be that audiences not familiar with the accents (I'm from Northern Ireland  close enough) might have problems with the dialogue.Overall it tries to be realistic and profound at the same time  both take away from the other and produce a film that has touches of intelligence and originality but ultimately is a little dull and disappointing..
One the films strong points is it's beautiful imagery, despite it's grim settings it contains so many haunting or breathtaking images ( the curtains blowing in the wind at the start, the tense dance between the parents to name but a few).
The Ratcatcher does not deserve to be perceived as a poor-mans Ken loach, it has a dream like quality, mixing with unflinching eye for the grittiness of life - in terms of lyrical quality, I see a lot of Terrance Mallick in Ramseys work.
In the first scene of "The Ratcatcher", nine- or ten-year-old James (William Eadie) accidentally drowns his friend Ryan as they play in a canal.
We meet James' friends and family--his loving mother; his spiteful, alcoholic father; his sisters; a gang of neighborhood bullies; his friend Margaret Anne, an older girl who lets him see her naked and touch her privates; and his friend Kenny, who is mildly retarded and collects animals for his private zoo.What we don't see is much of a point to all this until the final act.
In the scenes where the story moves forward, it attains a powerful urgency, and the acting is uniformly great.This is a grim, slow, but fairly good film.
When I last visited Glasgow I thought the city was a lot more vibrant, respectable even glamorous than the griminess depicted in Ratcatcher.Lynne Ramsay's film is set in 1973 Glasgow where rubbish is being piled up because of the dustbin men strike.
However, when it's all you know there is nothing dour or dark there, only a realm of discovery to be experienced like every other child and Lynne Ramsay bottles this essence of youth to perfection.Ratcather is visually stunning and the story is played out with an expert touch managing to capture a unique glimpse into a very Scottish time and place.
As her debut film, Lynne Ramsay is a wonderful proof there is always a room for poignant & reality centered movies, than British films in recent years were anything but doped gangster stories and sultry comedies.Despite the fact that it is a poorly implemented anti-idyllic Glasgow district, which frames the story, it's more of a psychological than a social realism that make up the film's thematic background.
Ramsay's instruction is nothing less than masterful, like Eadie's performance backed him up by the film's other actors.Ratcatcher is one of those films that, at the outset not to promise much about where it wants to go, constantly taking the audience with its new roads.
The film's portrayal of James' psychological life is unique and challenging without being conclusive.James dreams of going to the outskirts of Glasgow, he ends up there one day by chance.
Ratcatcher tells the story of a young boy, James, on a Glasgow estate, wracked with guilt over a friend's death and faced with a future that seems already mapped out for him.Set against bin man strikes in the 1970's, with black rubbish bags strewn across the grim urban wasteland and rowdy bullies always around the corner, Ramsey's film creates a bleak vision of this era for a boy's upbringing.
The film follows James and observes the relationship with his parents and peers and how he creates hope when there appears little.The visions of hope can be seen throughout, but only, like James, if you take the effort to explore or look closely; the field, the bus driver, the medal, the teenage girl, the shoes, the glasses, the mouse etc.
Ratcatcher contains some super images, my favourite being James upon the sofa (I won't spoil it, watch it and see).If you're really into this type of bleakness, why not create a double bill with "Young Adam"?
and yet, whilst the film seems very down to earth with that air of gritty realism rarely reserved for anything other than scottish cinema, it is also strangely surreal, giving the entire film a sense of childlike wonder that reflects the point of view of the main male character.amidst the entire poetic nuances of the film (ignore that mildly pretentious statement!) are the ultiamte questions of the meaning of the ending.
his only escape is briefly when he catches a bus to a building site of a semi built housing estate, surrounded by a field of beautiful golden wheat, one of the few glimpses of colour we see in the whole film.
there are a number of images in this film that i suspect will never leave me, but the one i will remember so fondly is that of a young boy and girl laying semi naked on a couch, simply holding eachother , sex never enters their minds as their loneliness is muted for a short while by their mutual longing for love..
Lynne Ramsay clearly has ability as a director and may well go on to make some great films.
It's Scots,  through and through,  and beautiful.Ramsay's 2nd feature, _Morvern Callar_ is also good,  but go out of your way to see _Ratcatcher_.
1970's low-end Glasgow looks like an alien landscape in this horrifically depressing chronicle of a young boy's barren life.
Set amid a refuse collection strike, the film makes piles of rotting garbage look like part of the infrastructure: rats, dead dogs, and head lice all but crowd out the people.
I saw Lynne Ramsey's later film MORVERN CALLAR and thought it was the biggest waste of celluloid it had been my displeasure to see so I wasn't expecting anything better with RATCATCHER However I was surprised by Ramsey's feature length debut .
I can't believe that comparisons have been made between this film and Kes: Ratcatcher has none of the charm of Kes and Lynne Ramsay did not convince me that she understands pre-teenage boys at all.
There are ever present in some form or another and Ratcatcher served as Lynne Ramsay's directional debut.In a rough housing estate in Glasgow in the 1970s James Gillespie (William Eadie) is a 12-year-old boy who accidentally kills another boy during a fight.
Despite his guilt James hopes his family can move to a new housing estate and way from the urban decay and poverty of his home area as rubbish builds up on the street.
During the course of the film James befriends an older girl, Margaret (Leanne Mullen), who is used as a sex toy for a gang of local thugs, sees the anti-social behaviour and social deprivation of the area.Ratcatcher is certainly a grim film as we see the world of urban poverty, whilst Ramsay also adds some artistic flashes.
There are obvious themes about a young boy coming-of-age, losing his innocents in a number of ways, his sexual awakening and wider themes about urban decay, social commentary about ignored estates and how authority is distrusted as we see it through a child's eyes.There are many story lines that could easily have worked as their own films, whether it is a whole story of a young boy trying to hide what he did whilst also struggling alone with his guilt, or a film about why Margaret is abused and the impact on the girl or even seeing more through the boy's eyes.Ratcatcher is a very well-acted film with the young cast and Ramsay does not shy away from the more controversial aspects of the film.
But there is a sequence with a mouse floating when tied to a balloon which was really out of place.Ratcatcher is a solid debut film from Ramsay, but it is a film that is lacking a real story or drive.
It was the most personal film I had ever seen - I grew up in Glasgow, I was the same age as the protagonist when the dustbin men went on strike, I climbed among the same mountains of rubbish bags, I could see that canal from my living-room window, I played on the foundations of a new estate being built near my home on the way back from school, and my first love was an older neighbour.
When the film finished, I was speechless; I felt like Lynne Ramsay had stolen my soul.
I would probably never want to set foot in Scotland if the only view I ever saw of it were in films like this one and those of Ken Loach.
This film tells a compelling story and has a deliberately ambiguous ending that could be interpreted in one of two ways, one upbeat and positive, one bleak and depressing.
Ratcatcher, a tragic but touching tale of a young Glaswegian boy's coming of age and increased alienation from the society to which he belongs, shows its director's roots as a photographer (that is, Ramsay trained in photography) all too obviously, in its strikingly impressive and poetic metaphors and symbolic, seemingly irrelevant shots of inanimate objects.
I'd just like to be safe: if you haven't seen the film, I'd rather you didn't read this in case I spoil something for you.Ratcatcher, a tragic but touching tale of a young Glaswegian boy's coming of age and increased alienation from the society to which he belongs, shows its director's roots as a photographer (that is, Ramsay trained in photography) all too obviously, in its strikingly impressive and poetic metaphors and symbolic, seemingly irrelevant shots of inanimate objects.
I thought the film was an excellent contrast of the beautiful and horrific, and the perverted life of its young protagonist, who has the typical naivity of a child, but has been forced to grow up prematurely after his friend is accidentally drowned in the local canal by his hand.
I thought the film was an excellent contrast of the beautiful and horrific, and the perverted life of its young protagonist, who has the typical naivity of a child, but has been forced to grow up prematurely after his friend is accidentally drowned in the local canal by his hand.
The curtains suggest the image of a body bag, something the boy will eventually need when he goes outside moments later and drowns in a filth-infested pond.The idea of innocence mired in poverty is the theme of Ratcatcher, one of the most amazing debut films I have seen.
With this one film, Lynne Ramsay has given me images that I will never forget.
Like many great films, Ratcatcher redefines its genre.
There are shots here that are too rich for words, but are so perfect, so lyrical, I wanted to wallpaper my house with them.With this one film, it's clear as the yellow corn fields that she depicts so brilliantly, that Lynne Ramsay is a director to be reckoned with.
If that time in my life were to flash before me in some dream-like, cinematic montage, it would undoubtedly include moments not unlike many I saw in Ratcatcher.
But despite many shared parallels, RATCATCHER is much less a feel-good, you-go-boy movie, more an extremely sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic portrayal of a lad with a secret and how he ultimately comes to terms with it.
It's a deeper, more emotionally complex film, blessed with a languid tempo and a plethora of symbolic images sure to inspire rumination for weeks to come.Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike.
He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be.
What is intriguing about Lynne Ramsay's debut film is how it initially positions us from Ryan's perspective, presenting James as the seeming bully, before asking us to consider his personal struggle for redemption.
After watching my third Lynne Ramsay film, I really enjoy her minimalist style (though it can make it harder to follow), and she just has amazing endings.
Scottish screenwriter and director Lynne Ramsay's feature film debut which she wrote, was shot in Glasgow, Scotland and is a UK-France co-production.
It tells the story about twelve-year old James who lives with his father, mother and two sisters in a poor neighborhood in Glasgow 1973 where the working class is influenced by a garbage streak that over-floods the streets with trash, rats and misfortune.
These scenes are effectively filmed to give testament to James' desires for freedom and a better life, desires that his fate will prevent.I give the movie credit for style--the colors and music help with providing emotional content for the episodes.