The best movies often become more mysterious over time. This is why many of David Lynch’s films have staying power or why some of the more inscrutable works of the French New Wave still thrill new audiences. It has been more than 20 years since the release of Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay’s beguiling 1999 debut, and the decades have done little to wither the poetic originality that clings to the film like a diaphanous shroud. Right from the start, critics gushed over the Glaswegian director’s striking approach to filmmaking, and though she has only made three features since, Ratcatcher exists as the most crystalline representation of Ramsay’s vision.
Ratcatcher opens with an arresting first shot – a close-up of a child’s head wrapped inside a lace curtain. You can barely make out his features as he twirls around in circles. Environmental sound fills the frame – the noise of kids playing outside, the vibrations of the street. The head belongs to Ryan (Thomas McTaggart) and Ramsay allows him to play inside the curtain for a full minute until his mother smacks him, shaking us and the child out of reverie. The dream is penetrated, and we land in the middle of a Glasgow tenement. It’s 1973 and the dustmen are on strike. Noxious bags of garbage litter the streets. This is a place of pain and poverty.
Ramsay doesn’t give little Ryan much time. After sneaking away from his mother, he repairs to the fetid canal that runs behind his tenement building. It is a putrid place, trash and debris filling its murky waters. There, Ryan engages in some roughhousing with 12-year-old James (William Eadie) and accidentally drowns. Rather than tell anyone about the accident, James flees from the scene and spends the rest of the film’s lean runtime carrying guilt and terror.
Shot mainly on location in Govan, one of Glasgow’s most deprived neighborhoods, Ratcatcher is not a drama of social realism. According to Girish Shambu, even though there are trappings of gritty realism on the film’s surface, this is not in line with the work of a director like Ken Loach or Mike Leigh. Instead, Shambu writes “[Ramsay] was drawn to capturing parts of the city that struck her as ‘ugly beautiful,’ that lent themselves to her lyrical expressivity.” While “ugly beautiful” may seem oxymoronic as a concept, these details abound in Ratcatcher as Ramsay ties together realism and surrealism.
All the prior description may sound quite dour or downcast and Ratcatcher does offer its fair share of misery, but that isn’t really the point here as Ramsay isn’t looking to create poverty porn. Instead, there are tender elements that peak through the rubbish. Small details, such as when James fixes the stocking over the toe of his sleeping mother (Mandy Matthews) or the friendship he sparks with an older girl who is sexually abused by a roving pack of neighborhood boys keep the film from sinking into a vision of complete despair. Despite the very real tragedy that threatens to pull James both literally and figuratively underwater, these relationships offer a soft alternative to the daily horrors that life in Glasgow doles out.
Consider the film’s centerpiece scene where James rides a local bus to its terminal stop. Ramsay sets this exodus to the gentle strum of Nick Drake’s “Cello Song” as the bus carries James away from the despair of home. He disembarks from the bus and finds a house under construction. He enters and fantasizes about living there. Ramsay then frames James as he gazes out an unfinished window, a golden wheatfield just beyond. We learn that James’ family is waiting for the government to re-house them, and in the film’s enigmatic ending, he returns to this glorious home on the wheat field once more.
Ramsay also includes some whimsical sequences, almost to prove Ratcatcher shouldn’t be classified as social realism. Kenny (John Miller) is another local boy who loves animals. When he brings out a white mouse named Snowball that he received for his birthday to show James, the pack of local boys steal the mouse and throw it around, claiming it can fly. Kenny, at first devastated, then ties the mouse to a balloon and allows it to fly away. Ramsay then ups the ante by showing the mouse leave the Earth and approach the moon.
Snowball may have escaped, but can James? Can he escape the weight of his secret, the struggle of living in Govan? In the film’s coda, James dresses in clean clothes and then enters the canal, sinking to its dolorous depths. The screen goes to black and then we see James and his family cutting through the wheat field carrying furniture. It is a beautiful day. Then James looks up and smiles. Is James dreaming? Is this really happening? And then the credits and the sinking form of the child, suspended in darkness. The truth must lie somewhere in between.
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