It's grim up North. Very grim indeed in Clio Barnard's follow-up to The Arbor, culled from an Oscar Wilde short story but more of a latterday postscript to Ken Loach's Kes than a tribute to Wilde. Barnard's dark but not entirely gloomy tale tells of a 13-year-old Bradford boy called Arbor, his best friend Swifty and Kitten, a local scrap dealer who gets them both into trouble.
The boys, both excluded from school for understandable reasons, are not exactly heroes. But at least Swifty loves horses and rides a racing trap for Kitten. Arbor is much more likely to be better at thieving valuable scrap, and that proves to be the undoing of both in a tragic finale which then merges into a brief and hopeful epiphany.
All this is translated by Barnard, who's documentary-drama The Arbor was notably forceful and imaginative, like a bleak parable for our times, less attractively humorous and hopeful than Kes and hard as hell on our sensibilities. This is a poverty-stricken world where you are ground into the dust unless you can, like Arbor and Swifty, make desperate attempts somehow to cheat fate.
If there's one reason to be cheerful it lies in the performances of Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas as Arbor and Swifty. Neither has acted before and both are great at suggesting the essential humanity that lies behind their rough and ready exteriors. If this hadn't been so, Arbor in particular might have become thoroughly dislikable.
The strength of Barnard's direction is everywhere apparent. It is almost remorseless in detailing the lives of the two boys and those of the adults they face. If there are some illogicalities, which towards the end make The Selfish Giant seem as much a fable as a realist drama, it is very clear that Barnard's voice is both strong and original. We knew that before but now she confirms it.
