While popular internationally, this film saw limited release in the U.S. I could easily tell why: Never have I had more trouble understanding an English accent. For the first hour or so, I had to listen carefully to parse even half the sentences, especially those spoken by teens like the star. (Kids still said "thee" in northern England then?) It probably doesn't help that director Ken Loach favored amateur actors. Only later, reading the essay booklet included in the case, did I discover that the DVD offered an alternate dubbing -- and even that wasn't so easy. Why not offer subtitles?
Mercifully, unlike the last movie I reviewed, this one doesn't rely much on dialog. Oh, there's plenty of it, but I could get the gist of events by watching. I might go so far as to say that I didn't really need to hear any of it.
That said, not a lot of events are important to the plot. It's a credible, sometimes slow slice-of-life story from the era of angry youth movies. Protagonist Billy -- who may have inspired the title of Billy Elliott -- isn't enjoying his life. He gets on teachers' bad sides, he doesn't appear to have any friends, his older brother's a jerk (Loach regrets overdoing that aspect), his football/soccer coach is harsh, and he has to work if not steal in order to make up for an absentee father. The unique part comes when he gets the idea to secretly adopt and train a kestrel, whom he calls Kes, in the manner of falconry.
The scenes concerning Kes are generally my favorites, partly because, well, the little bird looks cuter than I expected. Alas, they don't account for much of the run time. And in the end, Billy's feathery therapy can't last.
As a drama, it's good at evoking pity. Billy may invite a lot of the trouble he gets into, but we still feel what he feels. It hardly matters that I couldn't connect much on a verbal level; the proper language of cinema is emotion. I only wish I had that in mind going in.
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