An Ugly Duckling? (Billy Elliot (DVD))

Name: lily7star

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Product:	Billy Elliot (DVD)
Date:	12/02/01 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: See it!

Disadvantages: None!

This was a movie I was never going to write a dooyoo review on. I eventually went to see it long after reading Jill Murphy's excellent review and with that still in my mind as I watched. While there was *that* review, I reasoned, there was no need of another.

Isn't it interesting though how we all grab some aspect of a movie and realise when reading and re-reading what someone else has written, that what you grabbed is something different, something more personal to you perhaps? As for me, what I grabbed is different to Jill, even though she was the one who inspired me to see the movie in the first place! So here with no further preamble is my offering on the movie "Billy Elliot"

This is Stephen Daldry's first venture into the world of the big screen, and his talent and experience as a stage director shine through in the power, drama and emotion of this movie. Set against the backdrop of the pits and rolling hills of County Durham, this story of a boy becoming above all things, himself, unfolds.

Billy is the son of a miner, brother to a miner and last in the line of a boxing family. Men in County Durham mining communities are men. They mine, they drink, they live. One thing they never do is dance.

Billy loves to tinker with the piano which his mother used to play. There's no money in the family for lessons, but enough to stump up the 50p for the weekly boxing lesson in the village hall where the girls from the ballet class have begun to practise since their usual room is being used as a soup kitchen for the striking miners. Billy realises very fast that his talents lie somewhere other than in the boxing ring, and somehow contrives to join the ballet class without the rest of the mining community becoming aware.

This is one of the aspects of "Billy Elliot" where we have to temporarily suspend our disbelief. That a boy from a mining community in County Durham should have the guts to dance
with a load of girls in tutus is strange enough, but that word didn't immediately get out....?

When it eventually does, Billy is banned from ballet and dances a dance of rage around the streets. Back lanes and washing hung out across them brings back memories of growing up in the North of England in all its beauty and desolation.

Entering this movie is almost like entering a time-warp, or perhaps a new country altogether where timezones are melded and fused in new and confusing ways, for Billy Elliot is about the miners strike of the 80's and yet there is more here of the 70's. T-Rex, space hoppers, kerplunk and psychedelic flowery yellow wallpaper...T-shirts with V necks *and* collars, 70's mini dresses and Julie Walters in leg warmers.

Julie Walters plays the sexually and otherwise frustrated ballet teacher who dances because she no longer has sex with her alcoholic unemployed better-than-thou husband. She very quickly realises the talent in Billy and grooms him for the dance of his life - an audition for the Royal Ballet School to be held in the nearby city of Newcastle.

The relationship between Billy (played by Jamie Bell) and Mrs Wilkinson has some poignant and some funny moments. Who can forget the worried 11 yr old looking her in the eye and asking whether she fancies him, or the moments where she reads the letter written to him by his mother before she died?

There is plenty of opportunity for this movie to descend into mawkish sentimentality, but descend it does not. Rising from pain to passion and on, there is a fire which drives both Billy and his family. There are powerful moments of conflict and drama between sons and father, but despite their hatred of all that Billy's dance stands for, his brother and father are outstandingly passionate men.

The Miners Strike is more than a backdrop, it is a way of life and a reason for living in this place and time. It is woven as inextricably
into the warp and weft of the movie as is Billy's need and compulsion to dance. Alongside stunning visual snaps of how it was "back then" are moments of music which remind and stir our memories of those days. Was it really like that? Yes and no. The pain is real, the drama is true, but this is a beautifully powerful stage-managed version of a life and death struggle and we are never allowed to forget that.

This is one in a line of British movies I have watched, but it stands tall among them. It is a story above all of a boy becoming a man. A BildungsRoman for the 21st century, a modern version of the Ugly Duckling tale.

Powerful as I found the rest of the movie, the ending is breathtaking. I would love to give more of the story, sing the praises of the final scene, but this is not for me to reveal. Suffice it to say that this movie succeeds in leaving you without words for what you have seen. It taps into the collective unconscious and defies words leaving a sense of something beyond what we see with our eyes....

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