Where perception and imagination meet: Eadie in Ratcatcher

The Long Day Closes
FIRST-TIMERS GET UNDER THE SKIN
By Amy Taubin
Village Voice, October 17, 2000

RATCATCHER
Written and directed by Lynne Ramsay
A Merchant Ivory release
Opens October 13

The first image in Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay's haunting evocation of a horrific Glasgow childhood, is of a preadolescent boy wrapping himself in a window curtain as if it could protect him from the toxic world outside. Five minutes later, Ryan is dead -- drowned in the brackish canal that's as close as this poverty-stricken neighborhood comes to a playground. The curtain, in retrospect, seems like his shroud.

Ryan drowns while horsing around in the canal with his friend James (William Eadie). His death is accidental, but James blames himself for pushing Ryan in the water and then running away in a panic; his guilty secret makes an already bleak life more terrible to bear. James is a thin-faced, frail-shouldered boy with clownishly large ears that do nothing to offset the gravity of his demeanor. Ratcatcher, which has the feel of a film made from the inside out, burrows under his skin to the place where perception and imagination meet. If James lives in a world of abjection, he is not an abject character like Bresson's Mouchette. James anger, his emerging sexual desire, his nurturing impulses, and, most of all, his hope of escaping from the darkness to the light keep him from falling victim to his circumstances. But only for so long.

James lives with his parents and two sisters in a dank council flat where the vermin have gotten the upper hand. (Ratcatcher is set during the national garbage strike of the mid '70s, which made a large number of neighborhoods hazardous for humans but heaven for rodents.) Da (Tommy Flanagan), a bad drunk who, on at least one occasion, hits his wife, is more interested in soccer than his kids, but we've seen fathers far worse. Worried and worn though she is, Ma (Mandy Matthews) is still capable of affection. There's a lovely scene in which she jitterbugs with James, but she lavishes even more attention on him when she combs the lice out of his hair. James, in turn, performs the same service for Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), the slightly older girl he tries to save from the teenage toughs who've issued themselves a free pass to her vagina.

Sitting next to Margaret Anne on a stone wall above the canal, James is mesmerized by the angry red scrape on her knee. "Do you want to touch it?" she asks, and James places a tentative hand over the wound. The image is both visceral and suggestive. The bloody skin is a metaphor for the girl's masochistic sexuality and also for James's sense of being rubbed raw by life."

Ratcatcher is full of images that are similarly immediate and allusive, their poetry heightened by Ramsay's elliptical editing style. Ramsay's short film Gasman (1997) turned on a young girl's realization that she was not the only object of her father's affection; it was reminiscent of Jane Campion's early short films in its combination of anthropological detail with extremely subjective camera angles and editing so fragmented it gave the film the feeling of a dream. In Ratcatcher, Ramsay uses the same film vocabulary in shaping a full-length narrative to a child's subjective vision. As spare and unflinching as Alan Clarke's Christine, and as poetic as Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduit, Ratcatcher is a film in which viewers still close to the experience of childhood will be able to recognize themselves. It's also the most audacious debut feature of the year.