Whether they are used for their poetical view upon the world (The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton, To Kill a Mockingbird by Robert Mulligan, Moonfleet by Fritz Lang) or used to be the victims of a tough world one wants to denounce (Mouchette by Robert Bresson), many films use children as their heroes. Kes, the second film by Ken Loach, is somewhere between this two poles, somewhere between the confrontation with the mysterious and codified adult world and the recreation of the magic of the child look upon the world.
In the coal mining region of Yorkshire, in England, Billy struggles in his narrow world between a disengaged mother, an older brother more concerned in horse races than in his little brother and a school institution which seems to come from another age. His encounter with a hawk he will try to tame will offer Billy an escape from his desperating ordinary life. It’s a frontal metaphor. The savage bird is the child to be tamed. “You can not tame it, you direct it” says Billy about his Hawk “what matters is to make him fly”. Billy flies away from his home, from his brutal teachers and from his schoolmates bullies, he escapes, and, through his relationship with the bird, he opens to others. When the symbolical bird dies, Billy buries the last remains of his childhood, just before choosing what his future will be made of.
As an heir of Free Cinema, Ken Loach mixes his symbolical fiction with documentary elements. By focusing on the faces of the children and of the adults, mainly reduced to their social functions, by letting the rocky accent of northern England roll, Loach sets is film deep in the Yorkshire land. The moment of life and some cut scenes seem to be stolen, and if the film evokes Dickens (in its relationship with proletariat and the school institution), the balance between fiction and real life elements seem to reach here a point of perfection. No main thesis to defend here like in some later Loach’s films, a tiny plot and an accurate look are enough to create a true and powerful emotion, magnified by the fragility of a young and deeply moving actor.
Francis Chérasse
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