|
|
Class War issue 81: Billy Elliot
(PG, all main cinemas)
Let's face it the character of Billy was always going to have a hard time, regardless of the interest in ballet. He seems to have been a pretty weird kid before he got interested in that or discovered his best mate liked dressing up in his sister's dresses and wearing his mam's make-up. With those qualities in a Sunderland pit village perhaps boxing was not a bad choice in the first place!
Billy's gravitation toward dance and ballet is essentially a story of an individual swimming against the tide of expected and required behaviour. Earlier explorations of this theme have found some hapless lad expected to join his brothers and dad down the mine, when he aspires to stay on at school/go to university/be a writer etc.
In Billy Elliot this story is updated using not the hard labour of pit work but the struggle on the picket line during the 84-5 strike. It remains a story of working class hard rootin tootin fighting manhood set against the more genteel intellectualism of the arty and creative world of the would be escapee.
Some on the left (most notably Weekly Worker and Freedom) have seriously savaged the film as being anti-working class. Violent miners are contrasted to the nice middle class world of ballet and the arts. I did not get this at all. This is not a film about the miners' strike, the strike provides the backdrop, but it is just a backdrop after all.
The police rampaging through the villages and occupying pit communities is well presented, as is the solidarity and strength of the miners' collective resistance. I watched this film in Sheffield and there is no doubt which side the audience identified with.
Most pit villages have dance/ballet schools - the students being predominantly daughters of miners but the odd lad would not be unheard of. At Hatfield Colliery in Doncaster the Pye School of Dance is one of the most accomplished in the region, founded and instructed by the daughter of a miner and located in her native pit village deliberately. The students who were daughters of miners were taught free of charge during the strike.
Having said all that I got a sick feeling as the film opens portraying Billy's dad as a violent brooding man, and feared this would be the charicature of the miners as a whole. Thankfully it was not. Instead it was his dad's way of coping with the loss of his wife, left with two lads to look after in the middle of a long strike and no money he had more on his plate than most on his plate before the youngest lad starts skipping the light fandango. He comes through it all and thankfully without becoming a scab.
Given that location was obviously important to the film, the makers could have worked harder on getting actors from the region. With a couple of exceptions dialect was purged from the film, as it always is in films focused on Tyne or Wear. You only have to look at the verbally filleted accents of Byker Grove to see what I mean. We are eventually left with that 'north of somewhere' voice that does not come from anywhere but is meant to convey the impression it is not from down south.
This is a good film, worth seeing more than once. I have reservations about the extent of the reaction to the ballet classes. The strike had opened up closed pit communities to new tolerances and other ways of living, at least of a time. When the Hatfield Main branch of the NUM was adopted by the LSE Gay and Lesbian Society and their collections helped keep miners' kids fed it made some people think. Within a year the Hatfield Main NUM branch banner was on a gay rights march in London. The proposal to do this brought laughter and a few raucous wise cracks but was passed unanimously, something inconceivable a few years before.
In times of collective struggle new found awareness and wider consciousness, as well as individual and family relationships expand. Sadly many of these attitudes have retreated with that defeat of social and class solidarity, and more atomised and jaundiced views have crept back.
Given this, it's obvious that social, political and sexual values ebb and flow with the currents of class relationships. I would like to think that a lad during the strike aspiring to a career in ballet would have got more support than that originally advanced to Billy, not least because the weight of the women's support movement was considerable and influential. Disgracefully that movement was totally absent from the film.
See Billy Elliot, but leave the volume on dialectical materialism at home.
Back to issue 81 contents
|
|
