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copyright ©1999-2003
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
In
1970s Glasgow, a pre-teen boy named James lives in a shabby, cramped,
rat-infested one-room apartment with his overworked but affectionate
mother, his alcoholic deadbeat father, and his two sisters, both of whom
treat him with disdain. He’s playing with his friend Ryan by the banks
of the murky, rather polluted canal that runs in front of their
apartment building when a fairly ordinary horsing-around-type squabble
takes a terrible turn, and Ryan drowns. Although the death seems
accidental, James feels so guilty that he tells no one that he was
there, though the secret eats away at him. One afternoon, he’s staring
at the spot where Ryan died when he sees a slightly older girl –
bedraggled, bespectacled – being taunted by four boys. The girl,
Margaret Anne, has a complicated relationship with the boys: she hates
them, but lets them use her for sex nonetheless. It’s after one of
these post gang-bang sessions that the boys steal poor myopic Margaret
Anne’s glasses, then gleefully and mean-spiritedly toss them in the
water. She’s too blind to see where they’ve landed, and asks James
if he can locate them; James, leery of the muddy depths of the canal,
lies and answers no. Despite the fib, James and Margaret Anne gradually
become good friends, whiling away their afternoons together, seeking
comfort in each other when life gets them down. But when he’s not
spending time with Margaret Anne, or his slow-witted, animal-loving
oddball friend Kenny, James dreams of a day when he and his family will
be able to move away to one of the lovely, new homes he’s seen being
built in the pastoral suburbs.
Review
Watching
Ratcatcher feels a lot like getting into someone else’s head:
in this case, the lice-infested head of awkward young James. There’s
just something about the way Lynne Ramsay frames her shots – in
perfect, pristine photographic compositions that leave you always
wondering what’s going on just beyond the edges of the screen -- that
makes every image we see feel very, very specific and totally
subjective, like you’re seeing this world from the inside-out, not the
other way around, the way we usually do as movie viewers. Of course,
James lives in conditions of such filth and abject poverty that it’s
not always a particularly pleasant experience to see what the world
looks like through his eyes. He and his friends play amongst the garbage
and detritus as if it were a playground and not a giant dump (the movie
is set at the time of a garbage-collecting strike); they swing dead rats
by their tails like they were yo-yos, and not potentially
disease-carrying vermin; that canal around which they spend so much of
their days loafing about looks a bit like a giant open sewer.
But James is still mostly a child at heart, with all the dreams
and optimism of any kid his age, which means that he can sometimes see
small moments of beauty and hope in this bleak little universe that
seems to have run down, beaten up and broken all the adults around him.
A random bus ride to the middle of nowhere reveals a budding development
of shiny new houses – empty of both furnishings and people, it’s
just begging for James to explore. He roams in and around one of the
houses-in-progress, until he comes to a big, broad hole in the wall
where a window will someday be. The hole frames a wide expanse of
cornfield so lush and gold and never-ending peaceful that it looks too
perfect to be real; when James climbs out into that beautiful picture
world, it’s like he’s walked straight into a dream, or heaven, or
both. It’s these little moments of surreal beauty that makes Ratcatcher
so different from other movies that portray a similar world of
impoverished children: unlike so many others of this genre, Ratcatcher
shows a genuine wonder and amazement and love for the characters it
portrays.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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