Lynne Ramsay begins her debut film, Ratctcher, with an incident that could be the centerpiece of a more conventional film: a young boy (Ryan, played by Thomas Taggert), while playing with his friend James (William Eadie), gets pushed into a canal and drowns. Were this a story about upper-middle-class white people, the family’s exquisite suffering would be the whole story (Rabbit Hole, I’m looking at you). But in the daily life of the residents of the Glasgow estate (housing project) where Ratcatcher is set it’s a tragedy but also just one more misery in a long line of miseries that are accepted as being how life is. Even children learn early on to push down their pain, because no one wants to hear about it and to talk about your feelings would signal weakness.
James feels guilty over his role in Ryan’s death (to be fair, they were roughhousing, Ryan had just held James’ head underwater, and James ran away after pushing Ryan and didn’t realize that he stayed under) but has no way to process it. Most interactions among male characters are indifferent or positively mean, and the women of the estate come in for the worst treatment of all. Yet they accept the rules as given and don’t fight back or tell anyone even after being beaten or sexually abused, as is the unfortunate Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), because they that’s just how things are. Most of the rare moments of compassion we see occur between women or between mothers and their children, but they’re no match for the cruelty of boys and adult men.
My description of Ratcatcher probably makes it sound relentlessly grim, but the viewing experience is not like that at all. Instead, it’s a montage of moments from ordinary lives of lower income people (Ramsay grew up in a working class family in Glasgow and knows whereof she speaks) that haven’t been filtered for easy consumption or mined for poverty porn. Granted, things are worse than usual at the moment, thanks to the garbage strike of 1975 (the estate’s courtyard is filled with bags of trash, whose presence encourages the growth of the rodent population), but the difference is only one of degree.
There are also moments of beauty and joy among the misery in Ratcatcher. The film is told from a child’s point of view, and we can feel Ryan’s delight as he spins around, rolled up in the diaphonous curtains, even as we also note that his mother has no time for it. When James takes a municipal bus far into the countryside, he loses himself in the beauty of the golden fields surrounding a new housing development under construction. Ramsay also includes one fantastical sequence in which a pet mouse escapes into the stratosphere via balloon, landing on a planet populated only by mice with no humans to bother them, something James and the pet’s owner, Kenny (John Miller), probably desire for themselves. That we (and the boys) know perfectly well what really happened to the pet prevents this sequence from making us too hopeful for the boys’ future.
Many have compared Ratcatcher to the work of Ken Loach, who made a career out of telling the stories of working-class people, but I’d agree only if we limit the comparison to Loach’s second feature film, Kes, and not his later films which became more and more explicitly didactic. Ramsay is not trying to make a political statement in Ratcatcher, she’s showing you what it’s like to live in a particular time and place when you’re a particular kind of person. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 162
Technical details: 93 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray.
Extras: 2002 and 2021 interviews with Lynn Ramsay; 2020 audio interview with cinematographer Alwin Küchler; three short films by Ramsay: “Small Deaths” (1995), “Kill the Day” (1996), and “Gasman” (1997); the film’s trailer; booklet with essays by film critic Girish Shambu and filmmaker Barry Jenkins (who counts Ratcatcher among the films that influence his own work the most).
Fun Fact: The canal that plays such a central role in the characters’ lives was constructed for the film. Scotland still has almost 140 miles of canals (they were an important means of transporting goods when the country was an industrial power), the existing canals were all either too polluted to use or too modernized and clean to pass for Glasgow in the 1970s.
Parting Thought: I find it interesting how often a female writer or director will focus on the world of boys of men, when it hardly ever occurs in the opposite direction. My first suspicion is that the so-called public as well as the critical establishment are just not interested in women except as the accessories to male stories, so the writer and directors are playing to their market. Ramsay offers a different explanation, however: she says she was interested in emotional desensitization and pack mentality, which seems to apply more to boys. So are we both right or did I miss the mark entirely?
