2023-11-23 23:27:55
If anyone reads the synopsis of Scrapper, the story of a girl from a working-class and precarious neighborhood in London who loses her mother and deceives social services to survive, one would imagine a drama of epic dimensions. A gray film, even rainy. A film that would be made by Ken Loach, a filmmaker who has impregnated his style in all subsequent generations. However, the United Kingdom has always shown that British phlegm to deal with social issues from another point of view. The paradigmatic example is Full Monty, Peter Cattaneo’s comedy that swept its way to the Oscars and that, in comedy form, what it did was x-ray a community of workers expelled by Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal measures.
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These exceptions are beginning to become the norm thanks to a new generation of British filmmakers, almost all of them women, who are talking about the working class by opening their eyes, mixing genres and with influences that range from maestro Loach to music videos. He demonstrates this with success and intelligence.a Scrapper, Charlotte Regan’s directorial debut that premieres this Friday the 24th and that, with such a tragic synopsis, achieves a bright, hopeful film with a modern visual style that appeals to a younger audience. The formula has worked, after passing through the last Sundance Festival, where it won the Jury Prize, it has just received 14 nominations for the British independent film awards, the BIFAs.
The 29-year-old director confesses that she has always wanted to make “working class films that are happy and allow us to show these people without being defined by being poor or by their economic difficulties.” “It’s something I’ve struggled with growing up when I watched working-class films where the character of the characters was marked by their membership in that class or what they were fighting for,” she adds.
That is why his film is optimistic, an optimism that he believes comes from the fact that the people who are now beginning to tell those stories have belonged to those social contexts, people who “have experienced that education.” “We are experiencing a change in what those types of stories can be. It’s a cliché that people want gray and rather sad stories of the working class. That’s what they’re used to, it’s almost surprising when you find something different at a festival, because we’re used to Britain being gray and dreary, and our working class being accented. I think it’s changing now that we have so many different voices, with movies like Rye Lane y Blue Jeanwhich are really out of the norm,” he points out.
That is the cinema he likes to see, “movies where you enter and leave feeling lighter than when you entered.” “I’m a bit like a girl and I always want there to be a happy ending. This is how I consume content. I love optimism and humor,” she says, almost justifying her proposal. The cinema that she loves is the one that she discovered with her grandmother, sneaking into the cinemas. The first thing she remembers seeing like this was The Lord of the rings. “The first,” she clarifies.
I have always wanted to make working class films that are happy and allow us to show these people without being defined by being poor or by their economic difficulties.
Charlotte Regan — Filmmaker
“I was too young, I shouldn’t have snuck into that one, but I remember the feeling of escaping the world and how rich and grown up I felt. We were not a family that was very interested in art, it was not something that was talked about at home… My grandmother, in fact, what she liked were television contests. I think I can name all the television contests in the world. But, I am very young, I review the saga of Harry Potter every time I’m sad. I’m like a 15-year-old girl who sees The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars and that kind of thing,” he says honestly and without giving tone, quoting the great European authors.
That light is also transferred to the staging. With mockumentary inserts that break the fourth wall and focus on humor. Also its pastel colors, or its superimposed yellow letters. A joint work of the production director, both working class and with a very clear maxim: “Show our world in a joyful way.” “We always insisted on how we could do that in all sections, costume and production designs, photography… we wanted to get out of that desaturated gray world,” she says, pointing out the influence of films like The Florida Project o Savage South beasts“which combine the difficulties of the character with the visual spectacle.”
With her bad temper, Charlotte Regan also throws her darts at social services in Scrapper. People buried in papers, who have dehumanized their interlocutors and who fix everything with a phone call. A decision that they justify in that the film is “anchored in Georgie’s perspective, and she is a girl who imagines that those people say those things about her,” but for the director that point of view “says more about social services, the police or the Government’s relationship with the young community, than what they actually do.” “That’s how kids see it, as scary threats, and that’s how we were raised, even when I grew up, social services were a scary concept,” she says.
Despite the tone, the film also talks about loss, and it is something that entered the script when the director lost her grandmother and her father while writing the film: “In Japan there are children’s books where they teach grief much better. than to us. They see it as a language that must be learned, because we are all going to experience it and we are all going to have difficulties speaking that language. I think the unwillingness to have those conversations before they happen is part of the problem and became a big part of the movie.”
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