Kes

(Ken Loach/1969/UK)

Towards the end of the book The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks he points out that an increasing disconnect between rural communities and traditional agricultural skills is leading to over reliance on modern industrial methods of sustenance and employment and possible vulnerability in the future if those methods and systems collapse. Basically if you live in the hills and the only food you can get is from the local supermarket if anything happens to compromise that you have nothing to fall back on. The farming skills and work that made these places inhabitable in the first place are being lost. In some small way Ken Loach’s film Kes touches on the flip side of this, that of returning to traditional modes of living as an escape from the trials of modern industrial living. It depicts school boy Billy Casper as he finds, nurses and begins to train a kestrel that he discovers on farmland close to his council house in the northern town of Barnsley. This discovery and interest gives him a niche in the world which is his and his alone, away from his daily life of uninspired schooling, poor living standards and the expectations and inevitability of his future working down the mines like his older brother Jud. His outlook brightens in tandem with his falconry skills, he even receives praise at school. The idea is simple - passion and interest in one aspect of life will spread and benefit other aspects. Opportunity will follow if interests and skills are nurtured. Whilst it’s not an overtly political film it definitely contains a coded attack on the failings of the state in these communities, particularly in terms of education. But it is more directly an example of a harsh coming of age, the stark realisation of the brutality of the world, in this case represented by Jud, a small minded, uncaring brother who lashes out at the only thing Billy holds dear over a petty mistake. Jud is a product of his environment and ultimately he is the future version of Billy but when the film ends we have to believe that Billy has seen an escape route from the world he finds himself in. The local dialect used throughout lends realness and that’s what Kes is, gritty realism of life in a poor working class area laid bare. It is an absolutely essential film and one that elicits a dollop of universal emotional resonance from the details of a locality and its way of life. As an adaptation of A Kestrel for a Knave, the book by Barry Hines, it succeeds in putting every page of it on screen.

(5/5)