Writer-director Lynne Ramsay isn’t exactly happy that critics are comparing her debut feature, “Ratcatcher,” to other gritty social-realist dramas set in her native Scotland and northern England. But she isn’t one to complain about it much, either.
After all, the 30-year-old filmmaker could hardly have gotten better advance word for her excruciatingly poignant coming-of-age story.
And, being placed in the same fast company as Ken Loach, Danny Boyle, Gillies MacKinnon and Bill Forsyth has been nothing less than humbling.
Still . . .
“I really wasn’t trying to make any kind of a statement about working-class life,” said Ramsay, who was off scouting locations in Spain when “Ratcatcher” won a best directing award at the 1999 Chicago International Film Festival. “It was meant to be three-dimensional, rather than just dark or light.”
Like other British films tossed into the social-realist bag, though, “Ratcatcher,” which opens on Friday, takes place at a time when crippling strikes and a dying economy drove voters away from the Labour government and into the iron lap of Margaret Thatcher. Ramsay’s Glaswegians struggle to maintain some degree of self-worth amid the mounting piles of garbage that went uncollected by sanitation workers during their 1973 strike.
It is in the eyes of a sensitive 12-year-old boy — wracked with guilt over the accidental death of a playmate — that audiences from Cannes to Hollywood have discerned the same silver linings Ramsay once saw bordering the gray clouds that filled the Scottish skies.
“I was quite young at the time, but I remember it quite well,” Ramsay said. “It was as if the city was under siege, with mountains of garbage everywhere. They would fill the football stadiums with garbage, so it very surreal.
“Glasgow still looks science fiction in some places.”
Petite, soft-spoken and with multicolored hair, Ramsay said she came about her filmmaking career almost by accident.
As a teenager, her grades were good enough to raise a spark of hope in her parents that she might find her way out of the old neighborhood by pursuing a job in medicine. She fancied painting and still photography, though, and an artistic gift took her in a different direction.
“I always liked painting, and I was accepted at art school when I was quite young,” Ramsay said, in a brogue only slightly less thick than the necessarily subtitled dialogue heard in her picture. “I applied to the Royal College of Art to get a master’s in photography, but I also applied to the National Film and Television School. On the night before my application was due, I didn’t have anything to show them in terms of film . . . so I sent in about 50 of my photographs.
“To my surprise, I was accepted. That’s where I learned how to use a film camera and create visual images from the ideas of other directors and writers.”
After graduating from film school, two of her shorts won the Jury Prize at Cannes. From that success, Ramsay was fortunate to be rewarded with the backing of the BBC and Pathe, a European entertainment company that develops film projects, for a first feature, which turned out to be “Ratcatcher.”
“It’s a period movie, but timeless, I think,” Ramsay said. “The people in our neighborhood had mixed feelings about the strike. Being working-class, they wanted to side with the workers . . . but they didn’t want to live in those conditions, either.
“I used the piles of garbage as a backdrop for the boy’s loss of innocence.”
When Ramsay and director of photography Alwin Kuchler focus on the details of life in the projects — a woman combing the lice out of her child’s hair, a swirl of lace curtains, a child eating ice cream atop a trash heap — the images take on a stark poetic beauty. It’s easy to see how Ramsay was influenced by the photographs of Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus before turning to motion pictures.
Beyond all the documentation of squalor and poverty, she also gives her youthful protagonist enough space to carve out a few childhood pleasures, including a welcome, if momentary, escape into nature. It comes when the boy rides a Glasgow Transport bus to the end of the line, and finds an unfinished housing development on the edge of a cornfield.
“In reality, it was just some worthless scrap of land, but it was the first time he’d ever been in that kind of environment . . . all that space,” she said. “In his mind, it was the most beautiful place he’d ever been.”
To enhance the grimly realistic atmosphere, Ramsay relied on actors who would be unfamiliar to most audiences. To capture just the right look for her rough-hewn cherubs, she interviewed more than 1,000 boys for similar backgrounds as her characters.
“It was such an ensemble piece,” she said. “If I had gotten a recognizable adult actor, it might have detracted from the boys. I thought if I got unknown actors, audiences would find the characters more believable.
“I love actors who are chameleons . . . who you don’t recognize in one film to the next.”
Looking ahead, she’s working on adaptations of two novels, one set in the United States and the other in Scotland and Spain. Ramsay hopes audiences and critics don’t expect her to mine the same vein of gold she discovered in “Ratcatcher.”
“I don’t see myself as being just a Scottish, working-class filmmaker,” she said. “Only part of my next film — an adaptation of Alan Warner’s `Morvern Callar’ — will be shot there . . . most of it will be done in Spain. I don’t have anything against art-house audiences, but I’d like my films to be seen by the people I grew up with, too.”
