In a working-class South Yorkshire community whose bread-and-butter economy is coal mining, a boy named Billy goes about his life as a hopeless student, brother, and son, runty and undernourished, neglected and bullied, condemned to a future in the pits like his resentful and abusive brother. As if it were a historical documentary dug up to reveal the cold and lifeless social repercussions of a stale working class, the film, its bleakness and the stark social realism of this Yorkshire milieu, homes in on the childhood of a lone boy as the beginning of it all—this is where the soul-deadening habits start, and on this segment of the populace the great hammerhead falls.
Kes is so pristinely powerful because it looks at the roots of a withered, burned-out tree, poking around to see what happens when a singular seedling wishes to make its own way into the sunlight. Crushing hope as it blooms is the stock-in-trade of human societies like that in the film, and it furnishes its powerful story arc, which has made Kes a beloved highlight of what many have called British social realism—but most would be satisfied calling it moving and authentic.
As directed by Ken Loach Kes is a social indictment, but its great strength is that looks at the intimate moments of a boy’s life as he finds an escape from the harsh and brutalizing boundaries of his home- and school-life: finding a kestrel in the crumbling walls of a farmstead, he undertakes to train what becomes for him a beacon of his independence and freedom of spirit. Most people intuit that the problem with all compulsory education is that it precludes initiative, which is the only possible point from which any learning can take off, if it is to take off at all; this is an understanding most would not disagree with, could not disagree with, even if we concede that our modern public education as such does not preclude initiative—it is after all sufficient for so many children, and schools are not turning out thieves and serial killers.
But while public education is an adequate social solution, and a fundamental institution in any society, it often fails to nourish in the individual the quiet, subtle, and burning glimmer that makes him what he is, that he needs to nourish as the important task of his development as a person. One could say it is not the duty of a school to nourish the human being—but the human being must be nourished, and the school can act as an inhibiting force.
In Kes, school is one aspect of Billy’s neglected and hopeless life, intensified by a way of life that has entrapped even the adults, who are supposed to be the moral arbiters whom the kids can admire; but Billy’s teachers turn out to be vindictive, callow, and unwisely hidebound, ignoring that the punitive attitudes toward students dating to their own childhoods have perpetuated, rather than resolved, the endless succession of so-called misbehavior. More of the same has never resolved what is dysfunctional, defunct, and cruel.
At home and at school, in every aspect of his life, Billy is coldly rebuffed; it is the kestrel that provides him the spiritual outlet where he begins to soar, and the lovely grainy photography by Chris Menges is a visual pleasure. From the green, flowing meadows, the quiet and the solitude of the kestrel’s training emanate like a walled-off world, and Billy for a time comes into his own. During the fifty years since its limited release, Kes has been an indictment of a society and a biting social commentary, but its most lasting effect is that of the sanctity of hope, and of its fragility in a child that at last, amid the rubble and ruck and no-saying malcontents, truly cares about something. Even at its bleakest, Kes is burningly luminous.
