Ratcatcher, released in 1999, was the feature directorial debut of Lynne Ramsay, who has forged a reputation as one of Britain's best directors, if not its most prolific. Set in Glasgow in 1973, the film follows James Gillespie, a boy growing up in a grimy housing project who spends his days playing by the canal, where his friend Kenny drowns early on in the film. There's a lot of familiar ground covered here, with a working class coming-of-age story featuring bullies, gangs, sexual awakenings and grinding poverty. It's all unremittingly grim, and it sounds not entirely unlike a social realist film from the likes of Ken Loach. It doesn't however, look like one.
Ratcatcher establishes Ramsay's style of filmmaking from the opening scene, which shows James playing inside a net curtain in his home in slow motion; when the camera speeds up, the curtain's grubbiness and the dingy it frames become apparent, but until the moment it is a strikingly beautiful image. Whilst Ratcatcher lacks the budget of Ramsay's later films, it shares the same visual flair: against a backdrop of imprisoned fathers, knife attacks, and rotting concrete littered with bin bags and dead rats, Ramsay demonstrates that she can find magic and beauty in the darkest of places, with help from cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler (it's his debut feature too). Thus, James' trip on the bus feels like an odyssey to a strange new world outside of his normal experiences, as he explores a building site, then climbs out of a window to run joyously through a field of wheat. Later, there's a wonderfully bizarre sequence in which James' friend Kenny's pet mouse is tied to a helium balloon and James imagines it being carried to the Moon, there to join dozens of other mice living happily on Earth' satellite.
Ramsay also wrote Ratcatcher and like her subsequent films, it is often light on dialogue, with lengthy scenes featuring no dialogue and the story unfolding via facial expressions, actions and events. Ramsay's approach to storytelling is to show rather than tell, arguably to a far greater extent than most film directors. Much happens whilst going unsaid: any guilt James feels over Kenny's death is left unaddressed by the dialogue, instead lingering in the look on his face when Kenny's mother gives him a pair of the dead boy's shoes. The sequence of James exploring at the end of the bus line is filmed without words, with only the elegant, unobtrusive score from Rachel Portman to accompany it.
This approach requires a level of talent from the cast and careful direction from the director. Aside from Tommy Flanagan, most of the actors are unknown (one of them is Ramsay's niece), which adds to the facade of realism but is particularly notable for the fact that without exception they all give convincing performances. Young William Eadie, who's acting career seems to have fizzled out in the intervening years, gives an impressively naturalistic performance as James.
Synopses of Ratcatcher make it sound depressing and often unpleasant. At times it is, but at the same time it manages to be curiously uplifting, with the small positives of James' life seeming to outweigh the negatives, at least in his dreams, his hopes and imagination. It's a very solid debut by any standards and essential viewing for fans of Ramsay's all-too-slowly growing body of work.
Ratcatcher establishes Ramsay's style of filmmaking from the opening scene, which shows James playing inside a net curtain in his home in slow motion; when the camera speeds up, the curtain's grubbiness and the dingy it frames become apparent, but until the moment it is a strikingly beautiful image. Whilst Ratcatcher lacks the budget of Ramsay's later films, it shares the same visual flair: against a backdrop of imprisoned fathers, knife attacks, and rotting concrete littered with bin bags and dead rats, Ramsay demonstrates that she can find magic and beauty in the darkest of places, with help from cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler (it's his debut feature too). Thus, James' trip on the bus feels like an odyssey to a strange new world outside of his normal experiences, as he explores a building site, then climbs out of a window to run joyously through a field of wheat. Later, there's a wonderfully bizarre sequence in which James' friend Kenny's pet mouse is tied to a helium balloon and James imagines it being carried to the Moon, there to join dozens of other mice living happily on Earth' satellite.
Ramsay also wrote Ratcatcher and like her subsequent films, it is often light on dialogue, with lengthy scenes featuring no dialogue and the story unfolding via facial expressions, actions and events. Ramsay's approach to storytelling is to show rather than tell, arguably to a far greater extent than most film directors. Much happens whilst going unsaid: any guilt James feels over Kenny's death is left unaddressed by the dialogue, instead lingering in the look on his face when Kenny's mother gives him a pair of the dead boy's shoes. The sequence of James exploring at the end of the bus line is filmed without words, with only the elegant, unobtrusive score from Rachel Portman to accompany it.
This approach requires a level of talent from the cast and careful direction from the director. Aside from Tommy Flanagan, most of the actors are unknown (one of them is Ramsay's niece), which adds to the facade of realism but is particularly notable for the fact that without exception they all give convincing performances. Young William Eadie, who's acting career seems to have fizzled out in the intervening years, gives an impressively naturalistic performance as James.
Synopses of Ratcatcher make it sound depressing and often unpleasant. At times it is, but at the same time it manages to be curiously uplifting, with the small positives of James' life seeming to outweigh the negatives, at least in his dreams, his hopes and imagination. It's a very solid debut by any standards and essential viewing for fans of Ramsay's all-too-slowly growing body of work.