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Graham Fuller surveys British cinema's ongoing fixation on bleak lives and all things grim
THE NATION'S BEST MOVIES OF THE PAST HALF-CENTURY depict a septic isle, a post-imperial power that has routinely betrayed its most vulnerable citizens. Misery Cinema is that school of socially conscious dramas centered on depressed, oppressed, or troubled protagonists, stuck in many cases in the U.K.'s most economically deprived regions. Ken bach and Mike Leigh, the most consistent British directors of the past 40 years, have each made many films about those who appear doomed to lives of pain because of pernicious social systems and sometimes their own emotional shortcomings. Few of Leigh and Loach's works can be likened ~to a wallow or dirge, however. Meanwhile, the films of their prematurely deceased contemporary, Alan Clarke, comp~ise an excoriating vision, yet the fierce energy and movement of his work sits uneasily with the the notion of misery as a state of passive suffering.
Some of the emergent auteurs of the Nineties and the past decade have shown the clear influence of Loach, Leigh, and Clarke while carving out their own brands of grimness and trauma. Loach's crusading BBC "Wednesday Play" Cathy Come Home (66) and Leigh's Channel 4 classic Meantime (83), which both attack the poor state of living conditions and unemployment, are echoed in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (99) and Andrea Arnold's Red Road (06) and Fish Tank (09). Whereas Ratcatcher, which owes something to Loach's Kes (69) in its portrait of a downtrodden boy, is wistfully lyrical, Arnold's style is rougher and the tone of her films more melodramatic.
Both Ramsay and Arnold have shown how spiritual and emotional impoverishment resulting from neglect and harsh circumstances can bring about the sexual exploitation of underage females: in Ratcatcher, the bespectacled girl who shares an affectionate bond with the prepubescent protagonist has consensual sex with every bullying urchin who wants it; in Fish Tank, an impressionable 15-year-old living in an Essex skyrise sleeps with her hard-partying mother's boyfriend. More sulfurically, the woman grieving for her husband and son in Red Road stalks the former addict who accidentally killed them all the way to the eponymous blighted Glasgow tower block where he lives, seduces him, and then lays a rape charge on him....