Turning from the shadowy fantasy of an exclusive and moneyed boarding school, Ken Loach’s Kes, released a year after Lindsay Anderson’s If, presents a next level of grim to late 60’s social commentary. Here, the focus again is on British education, though not so much upon its sadistic homoerotic quirks or militaristic anachronisms, but rather its more basic, woeful inadequacies. The setting is a northern rural village, or possibly the edge of a sooty industrial town—Britain’s Pennsylvania-like heartland—tethered to waning occupations like mining or textile operations. As the film begins, a camera hovers intrusively over a dawn image of two boys asleep in a bed together, but this is no post-coital morning after.
The older of the two springs to his feet, is ready to leave for work within minutes. He is an older brother, an early twenty-something, perhaps, who may be the main income-earner in the family, which includes his bed-mate, the younger Billy, and their mother, a much-aggravated woman who presumably sleeps in a bed of her own. The boys’ father, barely referenced in this tale, is an absented figure. Billy, who looks about twelve, is slower to rise, apparently dreading the day ahead at school. He has good reason, for hardly a moment will pass when he isn’t subject to either peers’ bullying, ridicule from adults, or standard classroom procedure that is mis-attuned to his needs and deadening to his mind. For one thing, teachers and administrators only thinly speak the dialectic tongue that spins amongst the locals. If this film did achieve a distribution within the United States, it would have needed subtitles as much as any other foreign film of 1969. The thick accents and idioms pervade the dialogue, challenging literal comprehension, yet this is only a short-lived distraction because the drama, more a coming-of-destiny as coming-of-age, is so evident, and the feelings conveyed are unmistakable.
I must admit to a tinge of nostalgia watching some scenes, especially those which take place upon a muddy, uneven field whereupon pupils play a game of football (soccer), supervised by a phys ed teacher whose ugliness borders on the sociopathic. I was born in England, living there until the age of ten, so I recall grey rainy days and eagerly running around to keep warm and avoid being shouted at. At turns impassive yet impish, Billy finds a way in such moments to amuse himself, find private solace in a reverie before a teacher’s rebuke, or a taller boy’s brutality cuts him down again. Sadly inarticulate, Billy is hapless when asked to speak his mind. Like most of the children or even the adults in this milieu, he has little more than a shrug and a blank stare to offer when invited to explain himself, or to declare an aspiration. Teachers scoff with disgust, or express broad incredulity at the miserably apathetic state of modern youth. Unlike the aloof, complacent adults who inhabit the world of If, the adults of Kes are beleaguered, desperate people, misapprehending their universe as much as the kids they’re supposedly teaching.
As for life after school, for Billy’s brother, or his mother: it’s even worse. The brother heads off each morning to the local mine and likely centerpiece of regional economy. He’s destined for union disputes, limited opportunity, or the cruelties of black lung disease. Meanwhile, odd scenes depict life after hours, in unglamorous pubs and dance halls, or the squat quarters of enclosed living spaces. Snatches of chatter capture life’s morbid concerns: someone is drunk, embarrassing themselves in public; someone is the subject of gossip because they’re pregnant and out of wedlock, or unemployed and without prospects. The brother is ever spoiling for a fight, if not with Billy, then otherwise with his mother’s boyfriend who props up the bar but is not appreciably more present than the boys’ father. Implicitly, the British educational system, or the class system as a whole, is much at fault for this state of affairs. Visiting career counselors have little more to offer than brochures about the local factories and mills. One even chastises our hero, Billy, for appearing more than unprepared for this preordained future. Indeed, Billy just seems…elsewhere.
Billy is our hero, not because he has rebellion in mind (like Mick Travis in If), or a future plan—a dream—that will rescue from this existence. Instead, he has escapist fantasy which, paradoxically, represents his realistic coping. Plus, the escape he chooses is the endearing adoption of a wayward Kestrel (hence Kes the title, plus allusion to freedom via flight) he’s discovered at a nearby derelict castle. Away from school, or his argumentative family, Billy retreats to an open field to nurse the injured bird, coax it back into flight, soon to let it depart and soar away. Why? Because unlike our protagonist, such a hopeful future is possible for the bird. Unhappily, this doesn’t come to pass because the brother, truly a frustrated figure with an Oedipal jealousy problem, kills the bird in a fit of displaced rage. Broken-hearted, Billy buries the corpse in the field wherein he’d been training it to fly, and upon that sad finale, the film rather abruptly ends. Ken Loach, the film’s director and noted socialist, has said that he has little faith in social change as initiated by the privileged because only those who are disadvantaged are truly motivated for change. For this reason, a kinder, gentler ending to works of revolutionary art are not possible. They are less about fantasy, sentiment—the wish for something better—than simply what is.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 