Director: Clio Barnard
Talent: Conner Chapman, Shaun Thomas, Sean Gilder, Lorraine Ashbourne
Release Date: 25th October 2013
A very loose, social realist adaptation of the Oscar Wilde short story of the same name, Clio Barnard’s tale of two boys ― Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas, as Arbor and Swifty ― suspended from school and working as scrap metal collectors for an unscrupulous, ill-tempered breaker (Sean Gilder) is a vital and accomplished fiction debut. Following on from 2010’s acclaimed documentary The Arbor, her social realism is here tempered by a certain poetry: in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, horses fall down staircases; in Barnard’s Bradford, they step on exposed cables and get electrocuted. But it would be a mistake to consider this film purely fatalistic: its tragic end is not rescued by the breaker’s mea culpa, which is less of an individual redemption than a more important reminder that truth exists in sometimes pathetic relation to desperate material conditions ― a lesson, perhaps, for social realist cinema itself.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
