‘Urchin’: curious moral cinema, without morality or stereotypes | Cinema: previews and reviews

Both are English citizens, they had a recognizable style and similar concerns in their cinema. It is almost always inhabited by losers, by lower classes cornered by problems. I suspect that their old age has advised or forced them not to make any more films. Some were very good. And there are others in which his love for the pamphlet is perceived. I think they are very worthy people. And eternally worried about the sorry state of things. These two gentlemen, as intelligent as they are combative, are called Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Theirs is a cinema with little continuity. And we miss them.

But I note the encouragement of these predecessors Rascal. It’s directed by a 29-year-old guy named Harris Dickinson, who I’ve seen as an actor in several movies, including that sadomasochistic nonsense called girl, which told of the carnal passion of a super executive towards an apparently mysterious boy who was twice his age. Dickinson proves to be an interesting filmmaker by telling a story of marginalized people, seeking survival on the streets, sleeping on or in makeshift shelters or, with a bit of luck, in shelters provided by social services. And its protagonist is a very young man, in whose description the screenplay does not fall into the temptation of altruism, the mythologization of the marginal, the poetics of miserabilism. The turkey, adopted as a baby, manages to run down the street. A vile way to do this is to rob and beat up a stranger, someone honest and generous who tried to help you. They arrest him and he spends some time in prison. Upon exiting the eternal problem will begin again. Trying for a while to remain a hard worker and dignified, temporarily abandoning deprivation and drugs, with which he has an apocalyptic relationship, trying to stop his violence and his bad vibrations, sharing hours with lost people like him. Try to find a roof and a minimum of emotional stability.

But everything hangs by a thread. The director doesn’t try to make the protagonist attractive, and the supporting characters don’t take you away either. Almost everything rings true and the narrative creates a certain discomfort. There are many dreams or nightmares: I don’t know what they want to tell, nor what relationship they have with what we see, hear and feel, I don’t know if it’s due to my clumsiness in appreciating experimentalism and dream universes, or if they are mental lumps that the director invented and introduces them in an obscure (or absurd) way.

Harris Dickinson, forced by an actor’s escape, appears in a small role playing a very seedy and flaky outcast, who gives the stick to his colleagues, caring for and feeding the snake of a lover who may be his grandmother. He does it well. And it has as its protagonist, for me, the unknown Frank Dillane. He knows how to put a bad vibe on a character you would normally feel sorry for. This film has its own language, it avoids clichés, it has an atmosphere as depressing as the story it tells. She’s strange, curious, has personality.