The Selfish Giant (2013)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

While I'm writing this, The Selfish Giant is on Dutch TV. It is one of those British productions which comes so close to realism it makes you wonder if the actors actually exist as people. There isn't much hope in this world a violence and desperation. Even the friendship between the two young outsiders runs into trouble. Adults are mostly brutes, though one broken down mother still tries to give love. This is no easy watching, though the barren city landscape is shown with an eye for Gothic beauty. The camera even sees art in a heap of scrap metal. The two destitute boys with their pony cart for collecting and stealing copper wire and refuse hobbling along on the motorway make the world of people with money and motor cars seem eerily far off. This is what good filming can do. A great addition to the Ken Loach-style of realism and a shocking view on the caste society still alive in England where the poor will always be poor and the rich don't care.

One of the commentators has hit the nail on the head when they called this movie depressing. It's ostensibly based on an Oscar Wilde story, although given that the source material is a fairy tale for children, the similarities are so few that you can't really work out the connection.Instead this is a working class tale of petty crime and even pettier characters. The main characters are a couple of tearaway kids who decide to make a living by stealing scrap metal and selling it to the local dealer. The problem with this film is that the entire cast is unsympathetic, and the dialogue is poorly written, substituting expletives for insight.I don't mind low budget films with depressing backdrops - I really enjoyed the Irish tragi-comedy ADAM & PAUL, for example - but this really takes the biscuit, especially when you have no real reason to watch. And that ending is so heavily signposted throughout that it doesn't come as a surprise at all.

British cinema has long been telling us "it's grim up north." Directors certainly piled on this message during our '50s and '60s New Wave. Up in Scotland, as Bill Douglas in his Trilogy let us know, it could be even grimmer. In some of the work of Tony Richardson ("A Taste of Honey" for example) the grimness could be softened somewhat with poetic images of industrial landscapes. Nothing wrong with this. "Honey" is a lovely film in many ways, but if a director wanted to be hard-hittingly grim he had to jettison poetic visuals as Lindsay Anderson did in "This Sporting Life", possibly the greatest film of our New Wave. There have been innumerable "grim" films with northern settings since with occasional outstanding examples as Ken Loach's "Kes" and more recently Shane Meadows's "This is England." Into this august company steps Clio Barnard with "The Selfish Giant" remarkable for painting possibly the bleakest picture I have come across of life north of The Wash. True there are some beautiful shots of cooling towers and others of horses in misty landscapes but these barely relieve the unrelenting sordidness of the way families of no-hopers live on the fringe of a northern city.. The opening scene introduces Arbor, a disturbed, hyper-active kid being fished out screaming from underneath his bed by his constant friend, Swifty, to go on a night time forage for scrap metal. Although they are in the same class at school, Swifty seems that much older and more mature by virtue of a voice that has already broken. The boys always do things together, whether it is being excluded from school or nicking scrap to sell to the unscrupulous dealer, Kitten. Eventually Arbor goes one step too far when he nicks scrap from Kitten to sell elsewhere. Ordered to replace the stolen cable results in a shocking and unbearable tragedy. "The Selfish Giant" is one of those films that doesn't give up its secrets straight away. When I first saw it I was sickened by its unrelieved sordidness, with foul-mouthed characters such as Swifty's father acting completely without respect or compassion for anyone, but with the death of one of the boys some three quarters of the way through, the film begins to achieve a level of intensity that makes for mesmerising cinema. Arbor is not able to articulate his grief on the death of his friend but the long wait in the rain outside Swifty's house, his eventual acceptance by the grieving mother and the affectionate grooming of the horse in the the final shots say it all. Herein lies the compassion we have been longing for, the very stuff of great tragedy.

Arbor and his best friend Swifty, are excluded from school and are outsiders in their own neighborhood. The two boys meet Kitten, a local scrap dealer, and he amuses them by giving them worthless jobs. Wandering their town with just a horse and a cart, they begin collecting scrap metal for him. Swifty has a natural gift with horses while Arbor emulates Kitten, as he's keen to impress him However, Kitten favours Swifty, leaving Arbor excluded, driving a wedge between the boys. As Arbor becomes increasingly greedy and exploitative, tensions build, leading to a tragic event that transforms them all......From the first few minutes of this being on, you feel instantly transported back to those kitchen sink dramas from the sixties, such as Saturday Night, and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner.Those films had an air of humour about them, but even though those movies were a pleasure to watch, they had an air of slight despair about them.Which pretty much sums up this movie. The relationship between the two boys is unprecedented, and strong throughout, but every now and again, you breathe a sigh of relief that your not living there life, or in the situation that they are in, and inevitably will be in for the rest of their lives.Its seems a bit snobby to say that, but the makers make the twos life seem so worthless until they meet Kitten, who is just as abhorrent with them as very one else who crosses their paths.The acting is top notch, and the narrative is crisp and fresh, even if it does seem a little too familiar.The ending is crushing and doesn't really leave the viewer with a pleasant feeling, but hey, this is British cinema, and we can take the rough with the smooth.