164. Kes

Song - Blackbird (The Beatles)

Movie: Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

You don't often see Ken Loach be compared to Scorsese or Tarantino, which is why the best scene in this film took me by surprise. It involves a football training at PE class, and Mr. Sugden, pretending to be Bobby Charlton. Mr. Sugden is the teacher of the class, the 'captain' of one of the teams, and the referee of the game. He makes a show of being better than his 12/13-year old pupils, fouls with impunity, awards himself a penalty, decides that the keeper moved to early when missing the penalty, and wildly celebrates when he hits the retaken penalty. He glorifies his own talent, trash talks his students' skills and mistakes, and after the game turns the water cold when his keeper Billy is showering, to punish him for not saving the decisive goal, letting 'Tottenham Hotspur' beat 'Manchester United'. 

The whole sequence could come straight out of Mean Streets, especially because Mr. Sugden and Brian Glover's performance is the driving force of the scene. Moreover, Loach consistently highlights the difference in strength, physicality, skill, and aggression between Mr. Sugden and his pupils and lets the scene continue for much longer than needed, highlighting the laughable absurdity of it all. Whenever a team scores, he starts filming in the style of a TV coverage of an actual live football match, complete with a text at the bottom of the screen informing us that it's 'Manchester United 1 - 1 Tottenham Hotspur'. The sequence is unquestionably an indictment of the teacher's abuse, but it also the teacher's abusive behavior that is the source of the sequence' cinematic qualities and pleasures. Who knew that Ken Loach influenced Fight Club? 

I am a bit flippant, but it's a genuinely interesting choice Loach makes there. Kes is, among other things, an indictment of the British school system, showing how it uses (physical, emotional, and verbal) violence to beat the individuality out of the students and train them to become cogs in the machine. Billy's care for his falcon Kes is one of the few things that he gets to do in the film that allows him to assert his individuality and to do something that goes against the plans society has for him.  Billy is lonely and has few friends, and Kes does alleviate his loneliness, but this is not the kind of gooey film, believing that his relationship with Kes is a genuine alternative to real friendships. Rather, it shows that through the care for his falcon, Billy gets to express himself and form more meaningful relationships with his classmates and teachers. That in itself is a triumph. The film's view is that it's hard to express who you are in such a conformist environment. The only other person who attempts to do so, is Mr. Sugden in the aforementioned football match, but he can only do so by imagining he is Bobby Charlton, Safe to say, that this doesn't lead to a more meaningful relationship with his students.