Our previous experience with a film by Ken Loach, I, Daniel Blake did not leave a favorable impression. He is a highly lauded director however so I did want to try one of older works. Kes is in fact his second feature film though he had done plenty of work in television before this. This is in a word fantastic. It is authentic and completely grounded in the period it is set in.

Billy is a teenager who grows up in Yorkshire. Raised by a single mother, his family is so poor that he shares a bed with his elder brother Jud. Jud has recently started working in the local mine and is abusive towards Billy. At school, he is frequently picked on by other students and teachers as well as he is poor and has difficulty concentrating in class. His sole grace in life is his interest in small animals and especially falconry. After stealing a book on the subject and taking a young kestrel from its nest, he spends all of his spare time raising and training with surprising success.

Though plenty of things happen in this story, this is not the kind of film that is about the plot at all. Instead it’s one of those that capture a slice of what is life is like for the common folk of small town in England at that time. Integral to this is the local accent which would be incomprehensible to most people without subtitles. One example of the idiosyncrasies is when a teacher is taking a roll call and upon hearing the name ‘Fisher’, Billy instinctively responds with ‘German Bight’ because that’s what he always hears on the radio. Then there are the nostalgic touches like Billy taking a break from his job delivering newspapers to read the Desperate Dan comic in it. The camera even wanders away from Billy to better capture the larger community such as Jud’s working life in the mines and how mother and son have a Saturday night out separately in the same dancing hall and end up hurling insults at each other.

This portrayal of Billy’s life naturally invites sympathy but what’s great here is that like everyone else around him, he is both flawed and a product of his environment. His casual theft of milk for example is mitigated by the fact that he is undernourished. He does terribly at school but reads well enough to learn when a subject truly holds his interest. He has no prospects in life and seems indifferent about what job he’s going to do when he leaves school, but is adamant about following his brother’s footsteps into the mines. The adults are usually no better. His English teacher at least recognizes how special his skill in falconry is while his football coach outright bullies everyone. His mother loves him in her own way but makes for a terrible role model. It’s a depiction of provincial life that is at once very charming but also very frustrating.

Unlike I, Daniel Blake which amounts to an old man railing against the government and against capitalism, there’s no obvious villain to blame and no easy solutions in sight. We can watch this film and think that something should be done to improve the lives of these people, yet any change that we could make would also destroy some of its unique character. Anyway this was all a long time ago and things have moved on a long way since then but this film exists now as a record of what at least a part of Yorkshire was at that time, and it’s a fascinating and fantastic record.