Ratcatcher: A Flashlight Cinema

Take, for instance, the dazzling opening shot of Ratcatcher, which is rich and haunting in both visual and aural terms. We begin in silence, with an enigmatic image: a close-up, in unnerving slow motion, of a child’s face wrapped in a floral-patterned lace curtain, spinning ominously. Sound fades in gradually, and we hear a faint mix of children playing, street sounds, and a low, unidentifiable rumble. We stay with the lyricism, dread, and uncertainty of this moment—is the child playing, or suffocating?—for over a minute, until the spell is broken by a hand intruding into the frame and slapping the child on the head. It belongs to the boy’s mother, who scolds him and unwraps him; after they both exit the frame, the camera lingers, observing the curtain as it swirls slowly back into place, followed (finally, ninety seconds after the shot began) by the film’s first cut.

This intensely poetic opening is not an anomaly: it mines the “vertical” possibilities of a single moment, and is stylistically of a piece with the rest of the film. But coexistent with this poetic focus, traveling hand in hand with it at each moment, is an absorbing, eventful narrative that centers on a twelve-year-old boy, James (William Eadie), who lives in a slum tenement in Glasgow with his parents (Tommy Flanagan and Mandy Matthews) and two sisters (Michelle Stewart and Lynne Ramsay Jr., the latter the director’s niece). It is 1973, and a strike by garbage workers has left the rat-infested neighborhood covered in a sea of black trash bags. Early in the film, James, playing with Ryan (Thomas McTaggart), accidentally pushes his friend to his death in a canal. Keeping his trauma and guilt a secret, he makes friends with two misfit children: Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), who is sexually abused by a gang of boys in the neighborhood, and Kenny (John Miller), who loves animals. In a key scene, James leaves his neighborhood on a bus, falls asleep, and wakes up at the end of the line, at a half-built housing estate that borders on a wheat field of brilliant gold. For him, this space registers as a utopia of escape, especially because his family is on a waiting list to be rehoused from their run-down tenement to a place unknown. The film’s mysterious ending provides hints and possibilities about the future, but no certainty or closure.

“Ramsay was drawn to capturing parts of the city that struck her as ‘ugly beautiful,’ that lent themselves to her lyrical expressivity.”

Most of Ratcatcher was shot in the Glasgow inner-city neighborhood of Govan, which has long been associated with deprivation and poverty. The setting and economic situation of the characters have led some to hang the label of social realism upon the film, prompted by that genre’s long tradition in British cinema, including the kitchen-sink drama of the New Wave and the work of such contemporary English directors as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. However, to do this is a mistake. Despite the authenticity that emanates from the film’s performances, locations, and production design, Ramsay has declared that she did not want to make a film about “gritty Glasgow.” Instead, she was drawn to capturing parts of the city that struck her as “ugly beautiful,” that lent themselves to her lyrical expressivity.

Rather than straining to attach the film to a lineage of British realism, it might instead be more useful to think of its place in the development of Scottish cinema. Scholar Duncan Petrie reminds us that, for a long time, Scotland was represented on film not by its own people but by outsiders. Classic works such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! and Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon constructed a Scotland of the imagination that was (in Petrie’s words) “romantic, rural, and picturesque.” This changed in the 1970s with the Bill Douglas trilogy (My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home) and Bill Forsyth’s debut film, That Sinking Feeling, which helped put the country on the global cinematic map. Poet Margaret Tait was the first Scottish woman to make a feature, in 1992 (Blue Black Permanent); and with Ratcatcher, Ramsay became the second. This brilliant group of Scottish works is extremely diverse but nevertheless united by its proximity to an art-film tradition that combines a formally bold audiovisual style with psychologically ambiguous portrayals of character—a tradition associated more with European than with British cinema.