Writing briefly from Cannes, and comparing his film debut favourably with Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, I called Stephen Daldry's Dancer (shown out of competition) 'Stepping Out meets Kes' and a 'sentimental crowd pleaser'. Daldry's film arrives in Britain under the new title of Billy Elliot (possibly he and screenwriter Lee Hall thought Dancer pretentious or fancy), and I wouldn't go back on what I wrote last May. It is a trifle sentimental. It will, I'm sure, prove a popular success.
As in Kes, the vulnerable hero is called Billy, comes from a northern industrial town and has a brutal elder brother who scorns his hobby. Like Stepping Out, there's a star role for Julie Walters and a dancing class with only one male. But the movie is subtler, more graceful than anything suggested above. And the acting, editing, production design and photography are first-rate.
From the opening credits, the film takes us into the mind and body of the 11-year-old Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell), as he bounces in slow motion to the strains of T. Rex's 'Cosmic Dancer', free as the air (or like electricity, as he later puts it). He maintains these rhythms as he makes breakfast in a clean but run-down terrace house.
The year is 1984, the place a small mining town in Durham crawling with cops. Billy's elder brother (Jamie Draven) and widowed father (Gary Lewis) are on the NUM picket line; his kindly, senile grandmother (Jean Heywood) is in need of the attention no one can give her; his mother died two years before, at the age of 38. The dancing is a form of expression and a way of escape.
Dad finds 50 pence a week for Billy to attend boxing classes at a local boys' club, which he does reluctantly, taking with him his grandfather's gloves, an obvious symbol of macho tradition. Due to the strike, the same premises are being used by a ballet class run by the blousy, good-natured, chain-smoking Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters). Billy stops to watch the dancing girls and is dared to join in by the teacher's precocious little daughter. He's hooked and secretly pays his 50p for ballet lessons.
In a witty and touching montage, Daldry cuts between Billy's progress in class, his faltering attempts to learn from a book on ballet using the bathroom mirror, and his father, brother and grandmother responding to the same half-heard music. Naturally, Dad explodes when he finds out about the dancing ('Lads do football, lads do boxing, they don't do frigging ballet') and a contest ensues with Mrs Wilkinson, who has hopes of Billy winning a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School.
The frustrated Mrs Wilkinson, the surrogate mother whose alcoholic husband has been made redundant, sees the promotion of Billy as the justification for her own life, and confronts the angry father, a similarly disillusioned person. But though the film takes her side, the movie doesn't turn Billy into a creature too good and sensitive for the dead-end, culturally impoverished world into which he's been born.
Indeed there's an important scene where he shows a considerate, middle-class boy the same brutality he has himself endured. Nor is this, like Brassed Off or The Full Monty, a picture about turning a brave face to hard times and demonstrating the resilience of the working class. In the thrust of its narrative, and in the cross-cutting between the violent clashes on the picket lines and the dancing classes, Billy Elliot suggests that economic circumstances produce cultural changes, and that we must adapt to and, in some cases, embrace, them. The film offers the 1984-85 miners' strike as a defining moment when the values and attitudes created by industrial society lost their validity. Received notions of what constitutes masculinity need modifying and an evening spent dancing on a stage can be as demanding as a night shift at the coal face, and more spiritually rewarding.
Billy Elliot is sympathetic to the striking miners and respectful of their solidarity, but its politics are of a transcendental kind. For Billy, dancing is a solitary rather than social activity and we're shown him rejecting the tentative, amorous advances of a girl and a young boy. The escape he seeks, first through fantasy, then through professional discipline, isn't to another place or a different class. It's into a different state of mind, into a new relationship with the living world. A marvellous early image, which is echoed near the end, sees Billy dance up a steep, ugly backstreet. Behind him, there's a cloudless sky over a blue sea on which sails a single, fairy-tale boat heading on some magical journey.
This captures the essence of the movie and takes the sarcasm out of the description of Billy by his teacher's embittered husband - 'Durham's own Gene Kelly'. Of course the film would not have worked had not Stephen Daldry discovered in Jamie Bell a dancer of easy dexterity, capable of expressing both Billy's inwardness and his boyish innocence.