“Scrapper”: the phenomenon of the year in the United Kingdom is working-class, social and luminous

Raging about the workerist drift of his time, Gramsci spoke of the “reckless adventurers of the pen” to refer to those who, in his opinion, they had distanced the material from the primordial. It is as if for the Italian philosopher progress had to be happily married to a frown, in permanent and irreversible ideological contradiction. And that idea, with more or less nuances, is the one that has ended up permeating the culture of our time: there Ken Loach continues to walk around the billboard, firm in his determination to turn everything into a moth crumb; Danny Boyle’s cinema was installed there for decades, then deformed by pure excess. And in that tradition, but for turn thousands of hours of footage from the most social cinema grissettles irreverent and proud «Scrapper»the director’s feature debut Charlotte Regan (United Kingdom, 1994).

Compared to «After sun» –to review the relationship between an absent father and an overly mature daughter–, with «Trainspotting» –due to its frenetic pace– and even with «The Florida Project» –by flooding with tenderness the storm of an atrocious childhood–, the film introduces us to Georgie (brilliant discovery, Lola Campbell), a 12-year-old girl, crazy about West Ham, who has just lost her mother. Orphaned, she will try to survive by selling scrap metal and stealing here and there, until one day her father (Harris Dickinson) returns from the undead to take care of her. Together, in exploration of the least common multiple of maturity, will exercise the family in mourning.

A new workers’ cinema

«I think we are getting there. At last. There is a new generation of filmmakersused to filming with a cell phone or with whatever means there are, who are finally being allowed to make films,” Regan explains to LA RAZÓN about the most nominated film at the independent British film awards, a joy shared with her friend Molly Manning Walkerresponsible for the extraordinary photography in «Scrapper» and director of «How To Have Sex» (also multi-nominated and will be released in Spain in 2024).

“The film has changed a lot,” says Regan, who confesses that she started out wanting to make a film similar to Guy Ritchie’s. And she continues: «As a young person you are not aware that you have less than others. That’s why, when I see films about poverty, getting ahead as a working class, I know that they have been made by people who don’t know what it’s really about. The entire development of the film, from the changes to the script writing, It has been like going to therapy for free. I left it all inside», completes the director, aware of how her film, instead of romanticizing precariousness or stopping in a pitiful way, fills it with conscious colors: nothing is avoided, but nothing feels transcendental either. “Scrapper” actually plays with the idea that one is much more than one’s circumstances..

“We were never an artistic family, in my house there was no eight-millimeter camera lying around. Until the day she died, my grandmother said that cinema was a shitty career, that I’d better become a waitress”

This cinematographic triumph, in a dangerous game with the aesthetics of the poor from which the director emerges victorious, is only possible thanks to her little protagonist: «She is the best human being I have ever met. If I can ever convince Daniel Day-Lewis to work with me, I think Lola Campbell would continue to be the best performer in my ranking. It is very instinctive, we found it after the pandemic. “We spent a year and a half looking for girls,” explains Regan, before detailing her directing process: “It’s curious, because Lola is part of a generation, that of TikTok, that is capable of dancing or acting for millions of strangers on the internet but she is embarrassed to do it in front of a traditional camera. Most of the work happened because I lost my fear of the camera, because as soon as I met her I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.

Defined as “a working-class film but not depressive” y «a coming-of-age in reverse» by its own director and screenwriter, the new “Scrapper” is both an exercise in style and reflection. The garish colors of the natural “chav” habitat of the suburbs are not aspirational postcards here, but rather remnants of Regan’s own childhood experience: “We were never an artistic family, in my house there was no eight-millimeter camera lying around. . Until the day she died, my grandmother said that cinema was a shitty career, that I’d better become a waitress. For some reason, I had the waitresses in very high esteem,” recalls the director, who, far from the Spielbergs or the Almodóvars, who have almost eroticized her first contact with cinema in their films, lowers the ball to the ground: “The first The time I understood what cinema was going to be in my life was when my grandmother introduced us to “The Lord of the Rings.” Little by little I have been learning about cinema, but without that experience of the “blockbusters”, I would be nobody. “Harry Potter” is still one of my favorite movies, that helps you get an idea of ​​how little cinema I have seen», she says goodbye as sincere and frank as her work.