Kes (1969)
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Kes Movie Review
Kes is a 1969 British drama film directed by Ken Loach and starring David Bradley. It’s a hugely overrated movie.
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“Mere fodder for the mass media“
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It follows Billy Casper, a tormented working-class boy who is subjected to abuse both at school and at home. The son of a single mother, Billy’s existence is mostly bleak until he takes up an interest in falconry and begins training a kestrel that he finds on a nearby farm. While Billy forms a close bond with the falcon, his difficult life and harsh environment prove to be a challenge to the boy and his bird.
That is the premise of this movie which ends on a very dark note, but not much is felt owing to the film’s surprisingly low emotional investment. I simply never connected with either of the characters, and I found the characterization overall incredibly weak.
David Bradley’s central performance is pretty good. This boy never really had a career afterwards, but here he showed some talent. The acting is fine across the board, but the accents here are so odd and difficult to understand that subtitles are very much needed. Sometimes I wondered if they even spoke English.
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The protagonist is okay, but not terribly well developed which led to a movie which is never all that moving or heartbreaking. And because it needed to have been emotional given its dark ending, it is thus a failure overall.
However, that is not to say that I hate this movie. I honestly find it passable and okay which is to say that I give it a three-star rating out of five. But I am being harsh to it as it’s being judged as an immortal British classic when in reality it’s simply not. They say it’s timeless, but it’s actually very dated, in particular in its slow pace.
The movie is so slow that it’s a chore to sit through. There are long stretches of nothing really happening with the football practice being the “shining” example of that problem. Following the boys play football for at least ten minutes of runtime led me to ask – Why do I need to watch this? What’s the point to this particular sequence? This is not slice-of-life, this is simply a pointless bore.
What I did love about Kes has to be the first act which showed tremendous promise, and thus I was disappointed to find out soon that the rest of the movie will not be like that at all. Following the boy with his falcon throughout the movie was nice, and a pretty sweet coming-of-age boy and his dog storyline that was mostly well executed.
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But I particularly adored those scenes where the boy just roamed around nature. Those scenes were both grounded in reality and incredibly well shot and executed across the board with the score in particular being the standout. The score is good throughout the movie, but in these instances I loved how melancholic it was. This is the point where the movie reached its artistic, cinematic peak whereas the rest of it was simply never cinematic at all, but dull, bland and forgettable leading to one of the most overrated British as well as 60s films that I have seen.
Kes has a very good, cinematic and actually sweet first act with a terrific score in particular, but the rest of the movie quickly succumbed to boring, bland and forgettable coming-of-age storytelling with long stretches of sequences which don’t go anywhere and grind the movie to a halt how boring they are. It’s thus another overrated Ken Loach movie that constantly had me wondering – Is this really supposed to be one of Britain’s finest?
