Powerful portrait of bullied boy’s bond with kestrel
Kes is director Ken Loach at his best, perfectly illustrating the alienation, forlornness and disillusionment of childhood.
Based on a book written in 1968 (A Kestrel for a Knave) by Barry Hines, Kes tells of a lad brought up in a drab Yorkshire village. He’s the product of a downbeat home with a permissive mumand a drunken, bullying brother.
He goes to a school where the kids are also bullies and the teaching staff mainly a bunch of aggressive, unsympathetic, impatient automatons. Then he finds a baby kestrel (small falcon) on the nearby moors which he calls Kes.
He determines to train the kestrel to fly and hunt, and from then on he’s a loner, obsessed by his new interest which gives him his first purpose in life. The bird becomes his avenue to a free and natural state, the state his soul needs, and that his home and school deny him.
Parents need to know that this classic of English cinema is one of the most powerful coming-of-age movies ever made. It’s long and sometimes grim, though it contains passages of great beauty. Loach shoots the film like a documentary, simply observing long sequences of the hero at school, suffering the indignities of both the classroom and the football field.
This film was shot with a low budget, on location in Yorkshire, England using most local nonprofessionals as Loach’s leads. Although it’s in English, the South Yorkshire accents are so strong that it required subtitles for American viewers.
The young hero is brilliantly played by David Bradley, particularly in one memorable scene when he is persuaded to tell the class about his kestrel and how he trains it.
Kes was a sensation, winning Bradley a BAFTA for most promising newcomer as well as being nominated for four other BAFTA’s: including Film, Direction, and Screenplay. Fortytwo years on, Ken Loach’s socialrealist tragedy about a boy who trains a kestrel is still transcendentally powerful.