Kes

Released in 1969, directed by Ken Loach.

This is a film set at a few degrees above zero, and those few degrees make the difference. Take this scene: a northumbrian field, cold mud, grey sky, a scraggly group of schoolboys set for physical education. Among them is a ruddy slabby man (Brian Glover), his right knee wrapped, wearing his whistle around his neck like a medal (that’s the only way one can wear a whistle around one’s neck, but that is still the specific way that he wears it). They play a game of soccer. The man – their teacher – is grotesque; he cares far too much about his side winning; he hits a boy, he shoves another in the mud, he cheats. I can’t be too clear in saying that he is hateful, that 99% of him is hateful. But we see also that a single hundredth of him is real, can feel pain, can understand things. We see glints of self-knowledge, which in this case must be self-contempt – we see hairline fractures past which are a life with two or three jagged peaks, early on, and then vast troughs. And the man gets off some jokes, real jokes, he’s funny because he can be for an instant vulnerable. He is not redeemable, but there is still a human warmth to him, and that warmth is necessary for the scene to be animated, for us to enter fully into it – we couldn’t feel as deeply as we do the pains of the injustices he inflicts if we weren’t given that spark of warmth. The difference between a hundred percent hateful and ninety-nine is an aesthetic chasm.

Tormented on the pitch is Billy Casper (David Bradley); he is fifteen years old and much slighter than his age, with purple marks under his eyes less circles than furrows. Billy lives in poverty with his mother (Lynne Perrie), who can’t care for him, and his older brother Jud (Freddier Fletcher) who predates him. Jed works in the mines that abut the region’s green countryside, recondite shadows on the horizon, the destiny for young nervy stammering boys like Billy.

Billy is about to go over that edge: we meet him in spring, in his last days of schooling; at the end of the term he will sign the forms that release him into the labor force. This transition, from student to worker, is the subtle crux of the film. As a worker Billy will earn wages, but he hasn’t learned enough to do more than subsist. He will be an input, and it was Loach’s contention at the time that this was deliberate, that large numbers of British children were being left in an unfinished state because that was how they were most useful to industry,[1] which could employ this stunted product without worry that it might at some point undergo unwelcome developments – the hesitant unsheathing of an effective dissatisfaction, the flexing of a consciousness. To justify what might seem a waste, the argument had to be made that the material in question was good for nothing else, that there had been a spoilage of the youth; quarantine the rot, get what you can out of the questionable crop – start again fresh, maybe, with the next planting. This idea was important to Loach, and important as well was that it be systemic in nature. Individuals within the film don’t argue for it, but it has grasped them and they play their role to serve it. The film’s most angering scenes involve adults blighting the children around them, playing out the most tired, insipid scenarios – when I was younger… the kids these days… – with numb relish, blind to exactly what they feel and why they feel it; we are only just meant to be able to keep in mind that these authority figures have at most marginal authority, and are also victims of a remote ascended capitalist class.

The prism throwing light on these iron themes is the relationship between Billy and the falcon he tames, Kes. Kes appears rarely; the majority of the film is concerned with Billy’s public life, just like the world, when it cares at all, cares only about his public life, and then only the most public parts – his body essentially, that he be where is meant to be, awake when he is meant to be awake. Kes is the glimpsed interior, the thing that is lost to the world. Foremost the loss is aesthetic, spiritual. When a sympathetic teacher (Colin Welland) watches Billy working with Kes – attaching a bit of meat to a feathered lure, which he swings in long arcs as Kes drifts and darts around him – he says afterwards that it’s the most exciting thing he’s ever seen: “Thrill of a lifetime, lad”. The compliment is somewhat sincere, the tone kind and disengaged; part of what makes the thrill is its precarity – that it is an isolated and fleeting moment in a life which will soon be closed off. There is nothing really the teacher can do for Billy, other than respect him, and make some small practical gestures (chasing off a bully, in one scene). He is primarily a witness – although that is a necessary and important role when a thing’s value is its beauty.

There is a practical loss as well. Billy is quick and resourceful, and able to learn from books – this is how he learns to train Kes. He is not exceptional, but he shouldn’t have to be. Here again the film’s refusal to quite touch bottom is fruitful. If Billy were too much of a good thing, his waste would feel maudlin; if he were staid – if we didn’t have the flashes of color – we might find the waste too hard to take (we can’t stand to see a thing with no value wasted, it’s too truly sad).

Kes is not much of a name for Kestrel; it’s a name you give when you don’t have space in your life for names. A similar purposeful laxity inhabits the film. The style is too unadorned to even be unadorned; it wavers from hand-held intimacy to mild tricksiness (the most obvious example is during the soccer match, when the score is displayed mock heroically across the bottom of the screen; but there is also the music hall scene which cuts rapidly between Jud and his mother to create a clever faux-dialogue between them). The music, which could afford to be sad, is wistful. This is all done with the utmost care, but the idea is not to impose the care on the viewer. Only in the plotting is there a degree of willful manipulation. The closing sequence, in which Jud, angry at Billy over a petty theft that has ballooned into something greater, threatens Billy; and Billy flees, before realizing that Jud will take out his anger on Kes – this is done with precision and thumbscrew tension, and the sequence where Billy works out that Kes is in danger, done all in his head, silent to us, makes an enormous amount out of nothing but a distracted looking away. If we are lulled at any time into thinking that we are watching clichés, Kes has a way of catching us up. Early in the film Billy’s employer, a bitter old shopkeeper, accuses him pre-emptively of wanting to steal. How unfair, we think – poor boy. In the next scene Billy steals. And then at the very end, after Kes has been killed, and Billy has taken a hatchet and is hacking out a grave, we relax into the scene – we are waiting for the small scrap of uplift that must be coming after something so brutal; and we’re caught unprepared when the screen fades softly to black, offering nothing besides what there is to offer, which is what we have just seen.

[1] This characterization of Loach’s ideas comes from Graham Fuller’s essay Kes: Winged Hope, found here.