Ratcatcher

A Phoenix pick

If the title doesn't draw you in, the setting -- the slums of Glasgow during the 1973 garbage strike -- probably won't either. Nonetheless, first-time Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher discerns the lyrical song of innocence and experience in the midst of the squalor and the thick accents. Things start out grim for 12-year-old hero James Gillespie (William Eadie): roughhousing with a young friend near a stagnant canal, he accidentally-on-purpose drowns the other boy. He bears the secret guilt silently -- it's just one more item in the pile of woes that accumulate about his life and those of his family and neighbors like the uncollected trash that clots their yards and roadways. Ramsay combines the tough-mindedness of a Kenneth Loach with some of the whimsy of Bill Forsyth. All the elements of misery are in place -- the alcoholic father, the 14-year-old neighborhood slut, the vermin that double as pets -- but Ratcatcher avoids stereotype and sentiment and discovers the underlying humanity, beauty, and tragic workings of fate. Like the rat tied to a balloon and set aloft in one of the more magical scenes, the film ends up in the most unexpected places. Screens Friday, September 14 at 7:30 and 10 p.m. and Sunday at 1, 3:30, and 5:45 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| A Fight to the Finish: Stories of Polio | A Man is Mostly Water | A Trial in Prague | Blessed Art Thou | Charming Billy | Enemies of Laughter | Enlightenment Guaranteed | The Exorcist | Harry, He's Here to Help | Into the Arms of Strangers | Just Looking | Ratcatcher | Seven Girlfriends | Two Family House | The Yards | You Can Count On Me |

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