“British Bildungsroman”

Kes – Ken Loach (1969) / The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Tony Richardson (1962)

If one were to reduce Kes and Loneliness to their component pieces, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other. Each film stars a teenaged boy of working-class background who has a contentious relationship with his guardian, a single mother. Each boy rejects the blue collar job he is expected to take and turns to theft for income. Both boys are caught, punished, and find respite in a solitary activity: falconry and distance running, respectively.

Though Kes and Loneliness share a similar framework, Ken Loach and Tony Richardson handle the material in fundamentally different ways. Herein lies the beauty of cinema. Just as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud would create vastly different portraits from the same subject, each great director finds a way to imbue his films with an idiosyncratic style that transcends the story itself.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is indebted—both thematically and stylistically—to neo-realist films of the 1940’s and 50’s. Much like postwar Italian cinema, Loneliness is a political film, one that deals with poverty, class consciousness, and the struggle against authority. The movie is shot using grainy black and white film in a style reminiscent of Rossellini and De Sica’s classics.

Kes, on the other hand, is shot in vibrant color. The frames are composed in order to contrast urban and rural, foreground and background. Here’s an example: Billy perched on a grassy knoll, reading a comic book, with the town’s coal refinery in the background.

It’s crucial here that the refinery is in the background. The central difference between Kes and Loneliness is that the contentious class politics that weigh so heavily in Loneliness remain out of focus in Kes. The working class Yorkshire milieu provides richness and texture, but the film is more interested in the relationship between Billy and his pet Kestrel than the experience of boys like him. His character is not a type, his story is not a parable. Kes is a great film because the bond between boy and bird is so compelling that it vanquishes everything around it.