Review of Kes (1970) by Adam S — 02 Oct 2011

Early Ken Loach film has all of the textbook lower class realism that would come to distinguish his later films, but there's something special about this look at poverty, school, and growing up in tough conditions that makes it still one of his best remembered works.

Local amateur David Bradley gives one of the most realistic of all child performances as 11-year-old Billy, a trouble-maker who can't win at home, school, or in a bureaucratic small-town society, but when he finds an orphaned falcon, he reads a book and trains it to be his pet.

Most remember the scenes with the falcon, simply because they brighten up the bleakness of Billy's (and conversely, the film's) world, but Loach isn't wholly interested in a boy and his bird, he's interested in the way the boy tries to mentally escape his surroundings, which include an aloof mother, a sadistic older brother, being bullied at school, and misunderstood by most of his surrounding adults, and sadly, even the best of hobbies can't cut it in such a depressed economy.