To call Kes timeless, even as a form of praise, is not quite right. For it’s a film that’s steeped in a very particular time and place. It was made – at the trickle-down end of a decade that had begun with the kitchen-sink movement dramatising working-class lives as never before – in 1969 by a director credited as “Kenneth Loach”; when teenagers like its dirty-nailed hero Billy Casper (David Bradley) still read the Dandy and were scolded by their school headmaster for being “mere fodder for the mass media”; when the most miserable fate that could befall a young adult would be to labour down the mine.
Seen today, it still cries its authentic song of rage. It still cuts like a knife. Those mines may have been harsh and dangerous, but they also offered living wages, dignity, the basis of a community. Now they’ve largely disappeared. What has replaced them? Last month’s riots tell part of the story.
Loach – God bless him – is still as busy as ever, still chronicling the cruelties of capitalism, still championing the resourcefulness and bravery of those poor people who refuse to buckle down and know their place in society.
In Kes, that resistance is expressed in many ways. It’s there in the lyricism of Chris Menges’s cinematography and John Cameron’s gorgeous score. It’s there in the comedy – the alehouse camaraderie of townsfolk as much as when Brian Glover thinks he’s Bobby Charlton. And, most of all, it’s there in Billy himself: his ribbon-like motion as he runs across terraced streets and morning fields; his smart-aleck witticisms, monkey-like climbing skills, his eloquence when describing his kestrel; even, most importantly, his ability still to feel hurt. Billy is as romantic as Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, and as enduring and vital a Northern outsider as Mark E Smith, Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker.
