The Self­ish Giant

“Every after­noon, as they were com­ing from school, the chil­dren used to go and play in the Giant’s gar­den. It was a large love­ly gar­den, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beau­ti­ful flow­ers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into del­i­cate blos­soms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweet­ly that the chil­dren used to stop their games in order to lis­ten to them.”

Though they share the same title, direc­tor Clio Barnard’s bewitch­ing fol­low-up to The Arbor bears lit­tle cos­met­ic sim­i­lar­i­ty to the flu­o­res­cent idyll of Oscar Wilde’s 19^th cen­tu­ry children’s fable. Here, the chil­dren are ado­les­cent tear­aways Arbor (Con­ner Chap­man) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas). The giant is men­ac­ing local scrap­yard boss Kit­ten (Sean Gilder), whose appar­ent fond­ness for the boys is sub­sumed by his more mer­ce­nary ten­den­cies. And the gar­den is his hulk­ing, rust­ing pur­ga­to­ry-of-a-busi­ness- empire, piled high with pur­loined wash­ing machines, met­al plates and elec­tri­cal cabling.

The clos­est we get to the pas­toral visions of Wilde’s sto­ry are a few short excur­sions to West Yorkshire’s roam­ing fields, though they’re mere­ly the set­ting for fur­ther grim­ly mod­ern prospects, name­ly the strip­ping of secu­ri­ty-marked cop­per cables lift­ed from care­less con­struc­tion work­ers by the film’s delin­quent heroes. Barnard brought a sur­re­al mag­ic to the squalor of The Arbor, blend­ing doc­u­men­tary inter­view with uncan­ny lip-sync per­for­mance, and while she reins in the for­mal frisk­i­ness here, she retains her feel for per­verse splendour.

The burnt out car­cass of a Ford Escort pulled through rush-hour traf­fic on a cart; a teenage boy cross­ing an over­pass on horse­back; the gleam of a gar­den shed’s worth of half-inched cop­per shim­mer­ing in the sun. All take on a myth­ic sig­nif­i­cance as they emerge through the heavy fog of the film’s gen­er­al outlook.

In Wilde’s sto­ry, the self­ish giant of the title ban­ish­es the neigh­bour­hood chil­dren from his gar­den, only to have the flow­ers, trees and birds take exo­dus in sol­i­dar­i­ty. Les­son learned, he wel­comes the young­sters back, pre­cip­i­tat­ing the replen­ish­ment of his home. Kit­ten dis­cov­ers a sim­i­lar sort of self-serv­ing tol­er­ance here, at first bar­ring Arbor and Swifty from the yard before rescind­ing his dis­missal and tak­ing them on as unques­tion­ing lack­eys. This self­ish­ness infects young Arbor (played to pent-up per­fec­tion by non-pro­fes­sion­al new­com­er Chap­man) and turns him against the qui­eter, more mal­leable Swifty, per­haps the sole fig­ure in The Self­ish Giant who betrays no hint of ego or malice.

Wilde’s fable car­ries an overt­ly Chris­t­ian mes­sage and ends with the appear­ance of the Child Christ whose sac­ri­fice paves the way for the giant’s redemp­tion. In Barnard’s film, it’s Swifty who does penance for the self­ish­ness of oth­ers, his unjust suf­fer­ing radi­at­ing a calm through the town, the fields, and well into the clos­ing credits.