The Selfish Giant a humane take on desperate lives

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      Starring Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas. Unrated.

      The Monty Python team fired off a great zinger in The Meaning of Life when they set a sketch in the “Third World” and then cut to a shot of Yorkshire. In Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, the housing estates plunked down amid Bradford’s toxic industrial outskirts aren’t quite the slums of Ghana, but a sprawling rubbish dump run by a quasi-criminal opportunist by the name of Kitten isn’t too far off (and at least they see some sunshine in Agbogbloshie).

      Into this brutal milieu walks Arbor (Conner Chapman), a wiry tween with behavioural issues that go unmedicated whenever his drug-addicted older brother nicks his “kiddie coke”. Arbor’s best mate, Swifty (Shaun Thomas), has problems that include a drunk dad who covers the family’s mounting bills by selling off all their furniture. Together, these friends figure out how to make some much-needed cash as scrap merchants, stripping metal from train lines and power stations in a growing game of risk. Swifty’s native talent with horses, meanwhile, brings out the slightly more nurturing side of Kitten (Sean Gilder)—although really he just wants the kid to win the next illegal, back road chariot race for him.

      We’re in the well-trodden area of British social realism here, which sometimes gets tagged “poverty porn” by those who don’t appreciate either the tradition or the necessity of pointing out the country’s perpetual state of decline. The Selfish Giant distinguishes itself through its grim visual poetics—director Barnard comes from a fine-arts background—and a subtle, fablelike sensibility hinted at by the film’s (distant) Oscar Wilde source material. Hence that chariot race, captured here in a splendid marriage of spectacle and grit. Matters are elevated further by the tenderness Arbor and Swifty manage to preserve for each other alongside all the casual violence, hopelessness, and inevitable tragedy. Since there aren’t any fashionable rock-star charities pointing at this part of the world, Barnard’s humane take on these desperate lives will certainly do.

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