Soft gaze for a hard life in “Scheme Birds”
Unrated. 90 minutes. Amazon, iTunes, Google Play or Vimeo.
Gemma is a bright-eyed teenager from Motherwell, Scotland, a former steel town in desperate decay, where violence is so frequent, kids are able to identify murders by the number of emergency vehicles that arrive. At the start of the documentary “Scheme Birds,” Gemma professes that she never wants to leave.
The movie follows her through three critical years of her life, which she narrates in her own energetic and unaffected words. If Gemma is as tough as the town that raised her, the film around her is calm, presenting a measured portrait of a working class coming-of-age.
At the start, she lives with her grandfather, Joseph, who tends to pigeons and teaches her how to box. With worry in his eyes, he warns her about keeping company with kids who fight and do drugs. But Gemma is young, and love comes soon enough.
She falls for Pat, a troubled teenager who has been in and out of jail, and they have a baby. Now Gemma, still a child herself, has to consider the path that her new family will forge in a town where the possibilities in life seem limited.
The directors Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin don’t shy away from the fact that Gemma’s life is full of hardship. She and her friends describe beatings and crimes, but whatever trials they face, the camera is gentle and steady, providing the nurturing gaze they lack. Here, there are no raised voices, no bursts of violence.
“Scheme Birds” employs a vérité approach, observing as life passes by, and the directors favor visual stillness over the shakier kineticism of hand-held camerawork. Rather than dragging down the energy, this tranquility instead draws attention to the jitters and jumps of these young people who are in the process of choosing what their adulthood will look like.
The visual style is unusual for a documentary. The film gets impossibly close to its subjects, joining Gemma and Pat on cramped dates in a Ferris wheel box and lingering close enough while they sleep to catch the sound of their breathing. Each shot seems deeply considered, as if it had been storyboarded and blocked before the call to action. For all the impetuousness of its subjects, this is a film of remarkable respect and restraint — a documentary that carves shape into a messy reality.