Film: The Selfish Giant

Scene from The Selfish Giant

Director: Clio Barnard. Starring: Conner Chapman, Shaun Thomas, Siobhan Finneran, Rebecca Manley, Ian Burfield, Lorraine Ashbourne, Sean Gilder.

Reading reviews of this film, I knew I had to see it, although some critics made it sound like a rarified intellectual experience.

Intelligent is not the same as intellectual, thank God. Not that God appears overtly, as Christ does in Oscar Wilde’s original fable, and there is so much foul language that any taking of his name in vain passed me by. These expletives could have been deleted, but that would have lost the taste of the language of the society we are plunged into.

It is a society of which I have touched the fringes; boys and men trying to step up out of poverty by collecting and selling scrap metal, and coming not to care too much where they find it. We learn that there is no honour among thieves, as the boys, Arbor and Swifty, played by Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas, excluded from school, strive to earn a few quid to alleviate the destitution of their families.

The solace for the viewer is the loving understanding between Swifty and the horses belonging to Kitten, the tyrannical owner of the scrapyard where the boys sell their scrap. As I explained recently to a lad I have worked with, it is highly illegal to employ youngsters on such jobs, let alone without issuing them with equipment such as safety gloves and boots. As one of the boys’ mothers says, Kitten is using the boys. He takes advantage of Swifty’s rapport with horses as well as their need for ready cash.

It seems that everyone in this film has dirt on their hands, a point made early on when the boys bring in marked metal, and reiterated as the story unfolds. It seems, too, that everyone is without hope, and for this viewer the despair deepens and deepens. There are moving performances in this regard from the boys, and from Siobhan Finneran and Rebecca Manley as their mothers.

Why did I have to see this film? Because I know the local versions of these boys, wandering their local town on push-bikes like latter-day Wilfrid Brambles, a discarded microwave oven balanced on the handlebars, a few copper pipes lashed to the frame. If they could get a horse, they surely would, and would care for it more than themselves. For all the work they put in, or their elders driving round the county in white pick-up trucks, there is little money to be made without thieving. A boy has the satisfaction of knowing he is earning something; at thirteen he can call himself a man, and will see no need to return to school should the opportunity be offered.

This film is truthful; its story believable, inevitable in its tragedy, bleak in its hints of redemption. Watch it, and remember: it is true.