WORDS: Sarah-Kate Fenelon

I was fortunate enough to come across this film by happy accident. Clio Barnard’s adaptation of Wilde’s The Selfish Giant is something of a cinematic masterpiece. While I approach this level of excellence with caution, I am sure that if anyone deserves it then The Selfish Giant takes the cake. It comes as somewhat of a surprise to confess therefore, that I have never wanted to leave a cinema so much than throughout this film or desired the credits to roll, if it was just to end the agony. Simultaneously nauseated and inspired, The Selfish Giant is a powerful piece of cinematography which has the power to evoke such horror and sympathy that at times I found myself feeling physically sick or drawn to tears. Alas, I did stay and I am forever grateful.

Set against the backdrop of the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, Barnard explores the friendship between two thirteen-year-old boys, Arbor and Swifty, as they make the most out of crap. Literally. Between their crap surroundings, circumstances, and living standards, the boys take to scrapping metal for money to survive after they have been expelled from school. The film is a social realization of Yeats’s oxymoron the “terrible beauty” as we come to both love and hate humanity. The tender and symbiotic relationship these two boys share evokes profound emotion and makes for beautiful cinema. Perhaps one of the most tragic aspects to the film is not the dire poverty in which the two boys live but rather that it foregrounds the suffering of children at all. The innocent against the world is invoked as the boys attempt to salvage what they can from the rubbish they live in; carrying it to and from the scrap yard with a horse and cart they rent by the hour from the scrap dealer. The suffering of the innocent tears at the heartstrings of the audience. Between the shots of immense grief and struggle, Barnard pans across the landscape, with only silence for our companion. Allowed time to breathe and process what has just happened, these moments chill our blood and prickle our skin so that all we can do is hope for the silence to end and the grief to resume. The initiative these boys share along with their protective instincts towards family and friends encourage the audience to develop a deep connection with the film, and if and when anything should happen to them we ourselves feel violated.

While The Selfish Giant may be one of a kind, that is not to say it is everyone’s’ cup of tea. The faint hearted should be deterred, as they are almost guaranteed a psychological and emotional attack. For those who can perhaps stomach the desperate level of tragedy presented by the film, you will no doubt emerge from the cinema with a different perspective on film, if not the world