Film Review: The Selfish Giant (2014)

Film Review from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Selfish Giant directed by Clio Barnard is a poetic social-realist film, unsentimental, politically angry in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Kes. Barnard’s aim was ‘to make a film in the realist tradition of fables about children’ like De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups, and Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. She has created a damning portrait of capitalist society where a ADD-afflicted teen called Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas) engage in ‘scrapping’: collecting scrap metal or the detritus of capitalism with a horse and cart in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford with its cooling towers and electricity pylons.

It is inspired by the Oscar Wilde story The Selfish Giant whose message is that private property is evil; a permanent winter descends caused by his determination to stop children playing in the grounds of his castle. Barnard uses the metaphor for the deleterious effect on communities when society as a whole fails children. Wilde himself wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: ‘With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.’

Barnard said ‘The selfish giant of my film is a selfish ideology. I liked Glenda Jackson’s speech in the House of Commons after the death of Thatcher when she said that under Thatcher selfishness and greed had become virtues. The film is about what got lost.’ The Selfish Giant is about capitalism and consumerism fuelling greed, selfishness as an ideology, children marginalised and the general lack of concern about society in capitalism.

Steve Clayton

The opportunist tendency (1988)

Film Review from the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hundreds of women experience sexual harassment at work. Many do little or nothing about it since the harasser is frequently their boss - to complain could lead to dismissal. And, until recently, many trade unions have failed to take the issue seriously.

Business as Usual is based on the true story of one woman worker who did complain about the harassment by their boss of a fellow worker and got sacked as a result. The film focuses on her struggle to get her job back. The woman at the centre of the story, played convincingly by Glenda Jackson, is inexperienced in industrial disputes and is only too happy for her campaign to be taken over by the unemployed section of the TGWU in which her son and his girlfriend—members of the Militant Tendency—are heavily involved, especially in view of the half-hearted support given by the union's full-time officials. As well as coping with this struggle, she is also trying to deal with the domestic consequences of her husband's (himself a former trade union official) redundancy and his affair with an oh-so-sincere television reporter.

Ultimately, the film as a whole, despite what is basically a good story, fails to convince because it tries to do too much. It takes on not only sexual harassment but also racism, police brutality, unemployment, sex-role reversal and trade union conservatism. Furthermore the "baddies" in the film—the harasser and the owner of the company—are unconvincing caricatures. I'm sure there are people who are that slimy but it would have been far better if they were less like the twentieth century equivalent of the cartoon capitalist in top hat of the nineteenth century.

The most true-to-life part of the film—apart from the sexual harassment—was the depiction of Militant Tendency activists taking over the fight for Babs' reinstatement. The film was much too generous to them, however, failing to show the true extent of their political opportunism. However that willingness to clamber aboard any bandwagon they can for their own ends was demonstrated admirably by the twenty or so Tendency members who waited outside the cinema to greet the crowd as they emerged with copies of Militant for sale. An example of life imitating art, perhaps?

Janie Percy-Smith