Kes is the story of a few weeks in the life of a schoolboy, Billy Casper, against the backdrop of social disintegration that was the north of England in the late 1960s. Billy finds and trains a kestrel, investing in it all the latent energy that his school and rough home life have suppressed, and finding in it a release from the all too present reality of the rest of his existence.
An outstanding performance from David Bradley as Billy glues together the sometimes shaky portrayals of the other characters. As a contemporary social commentary this is a film that has many of the elements you might expect. Billy has an impoverished family with an elder brother working down the pit and a single mother struggling to cope with the situation in which she finds herself. His school is staffed by teachers who react to their part in a failing system with aggression towards the pupils. And he's quite at home with petty crime, stealing a pint from the milkman and a volume to help him train the kestrel from the second hand bookshop. But the film is saved from cliché by the honesty of the acting and the quality of the direction; it seems at times as if we're watching a fly on the wall documentary. The reactions of the boys to the rant and the caning they receive for being caught smoking is entirely natural. Brian Glover as the sadistic games master is all too credible. And the employment interview is too close to my own experience to be fiction.
The film moves to its inevitable and unforgettable conclusion and we're left wondering what happened to Billy Casper after the filming finished.
