There are way too few movies about girls, and even fewer about girls in the precarious tween years. Scrapper is one of that rare breed. Its protagonist, 12-year-old Georgie, is more precarious than most. Oh, it’s not that the trials and dangers of female adolescence have hit her yet — in fact, she’s lingering in that strange preteen twilight of imagining you’re much more grown up than you actually are. Because this is the shape of her precarity: her single mother has died, and she’s fending for herself in their small social-housing flat in east London.
If that sounds dreary, well, it’s not… not in the least. Georgie — star Lola Campbell is a real find — misses her mom desperately, and is very serious about making sure she gives each of the stages of grief its due. But other than that, she is having a ball. She’s very responsible, cooking and cleaning, doing laundry… um, stealing and fencing bikes to get the money she needs to survive, and, er, having a local shop clerk pretend to be her uncle on the phone when the school or “the social” (ie, social worker) checks in on her. Georgie still retains that brash confidence of little girls — she seems younger than 12, in many ways, for all her adulting — and her life screams with it.
Its singular portrait of a girl full of verve and personality is only one of the things that makes Scrapper such a delight and a treasure. Music-video veteran Charlotte Regan makes an astonishing feature debut here, as writer and director, with a film that is as cheeky and imaginative, as pleasantly messy and chaotic, as its young heroine. Too many movies about the British working class are bitter and painful, but this one is full of joy and fun, and happy to let pass uncommented upon challenging aspects of life and living that other films might make a big deal about. Georgie wears a hearing aid, for one thing. Not a word is said by anyone about it; it’s just a part of who Georgie is — she is definitely not her disability, nor is she defined by any of the difficulties she faces.
Forget social realism (not that that’s not needed, of course, but a break once in a while is very welcome): Scrapper verges on magic realism, from the talking spiders in Georgie’s flat, which she is always careful not to vacuum up, to the imaginary mountain of junk in her bedroom; the teetering tower is her headspace, and she a sort of self-imprisoned Rapunzel. Even her solitude verges on the fantastical, on a Pippi Longstocking–esque daydream of child(like)(ish) autonomy. It’s not plausible, of course, that none of the adults in her periphery would realize that she’s on her own, or that her mother, whom we see had time to prepare for death, would not have made arrangements for Georgie’s care.
Well. Georgie’s mom tried to make a certain sort of arrangement: she left pleading voicemails for her long-estranged ex, Georgie’s dad, to come take care of this “proper little weirdo” they made together, though her messages went seemingly unanswered. Until the day Jason (Harris Dickinson: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, The Darkest Minds) shows up on Georgie’s doorstep and elbows his way into her life. She’s wary, of course — she’s never met this guy before, and where’s he been all this time? — and stubbornly independent, and he swings back and forth from struggling with parenthood to being disarmingly sweet about it. Between her precociousness and his immaturity, they kinda meet in the middle, on the same emotional level.
The two actors are enchanting together: the scene in which they playact a conversation between the posh couple they spot on the train platform across from them is so fresh and authentic that it feels spontaneous in a way that is uncommon even for improvised dialogue. (Perhaps the exchange was indeed ad-libbed, which would be even more remarkable.) The chemistry at work here is delicious, and renders his persistence and her slow thawing to him wonderfully believable.
Scrapper won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s well deserved. There is irresistibly engaging joie de cinema here. I adore this movie.
more films like this:
• I Kill Giants [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Netflix UK]
• The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | BFI Player UK | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
