Directed by Jim Sheridan. Starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Marton Csokas, Elias Koteas, Jane Alexander, Taylor Geare, Claire Geare, Rachel Fox 15A cert, general release, 92 min
THE PHRASE “grim up north” might have been coined for Barnsley boy Billy Casper (David Bradley), a lonely little runt who lives with no chums, a boozy mom and a tyrannical half-brother.
An academic flop and the last kid to get picked for football, Billy is barely tolerated at home, on the playground or by the local newsagent, for whom he does a paper round. Everybody, the shopkeeper reminds Billy, told him not to trust a lad from the housing estate. Teachers are equally scornful and a life down pit in Britain’s lowest paying sector seems certain.
Billy’s bleak economic prospects are matched by intellectual deprivations. He kicks around fields and local farms, swipes bottles of milk and seems to have accepted the worthlessness that everybody else is more than willing to project onto his scrawny person.
A sighting of a kestrel on a neighbour’s land offers some small chance of escape. It’s the first time the boy is inspired to take enough interest in anything to pick up a book and look into it. The tome is swiped from a local bookstore and earns him an anti-intellectual thump from his unloving sibling, but it’s enough to get him started in hawking.
Boy and bird, whom he calls Kes, soon bond in a most affecting way. They're made for one another. As the title of Barry Hines' source novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, calls out, a "useless kestrel" represented the bottom of the falconry league tables, a lowly status shared by the creature's owner. Sadly, Kes and Billy's time together is destined to be brief.
Kesis 42 years' old, a landmark that allows the viewer the luxury, however erroneous, of believing that such a miserable childhood could not happen in Western Europe now. There is, indeed, something particularly tragic about the film's grey, late-1960s milieu, a time when children could be demonised as nogoodniks yet dismissed under a pre-war banner that demanded they be seen and not heard.
Kesis Ken Loach's answer to Stagecoach, an embryonic promise of the powerful socially conscious milieu that film-maker would forge and master. Who knew he'd still be fighting the same good fight four decades later?
