The beginnings of director of Harris Dickinson are devastating

When you are a film critic that sees the film after the film and reviews them during a busy festival, there can be a tendency to leave you out of the image in order to prioritize being more analytical and detach what you see. There are no things to do with the beginnings of actor Harris Dickinson “Urchin”.

A drama on a man who goes to live in the streets of London to try to start his life again and free himself from the grip of dependence after a visit to prison, it is the first film where the last moments made my breath in my throat while I started to tear in Cannes this year. It is not a little success. It is the type of moment that testifies to what extent it is written and made with confidence because it takes what was an otherwise simple but always effective film, then transforms it into something more brilliant in an unexpected way.

Even if this year’s festival has already benefited from an excellent example of an actor who makes a memorable director in the ouster of Kristen Stewart “The Chronology of Water”, “Urchin” by Dickinson is more than the trouble to be held in the same esteem. Going even further, while Dickinson made comparisons with the work of the great director Mike Leigh, the film that has the most making a clicking around my head while watching this was “trainspotting” by Danny Boyle. It is not because he uses narration or music in a similar way – it is entirely without the first – but because of the soul. The two are films on deeply imperfect people who try to do better, only to be constantly getting back in the same old painful models and making the same mistakes.

All this rests on the shoulders of a fantastic Frank Dillane who does not only play Mike, he fully embodies it. From the opening scene where we see him awake in the street, unable to sleep because of a street preacher who shouts who peddles the Bibles, we feel the frustration and the agony which has just not even been able to have a moment of peace for yourself. Dillane will probably be known for most for his brief role as a young Tom Riddle in the film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, but you immediately forget such a story and you are in the place completely wrapped in the daily life of Mike.

He tries to get money for the food of the carefree Londoners who watch him, is expelled from a restaurant where he tries to load his phone before falling asleep, and finally manages to find a place to rest in a parking lot. His life is then to derive every day before he reaches a confrontation with another street resident (which is notably played by Dickinson himself) after having stolen his wallet. When Mike is then helped by a stranger who breaks the fight and offers to buy food, he waits for both to be alone. He then attacks and deprives him.

It is a sudden moment of violence that the film spends the rest of the execution to question gently. Rather than trying to alienate ourselves from Mike or reduce it to someone to descend, the film simply observes it with all its many complications. Dickinson is not interested in absorbing his protagonist for what he has done or, it seems, is Mike himself. As it serves his time, cleans, begins a job and initially builds a new life, he is open to what he has done. Although it is clear that he did it out of despair for a solution, it is not something he uses to let himself be won. He still injured another person and now he will have to understand how to continue after that.

Shot by emphasizing the character in his close -ups, including an emotionally complicated scene built around restorative justice which is one of the many where the film makes you fall on the side, we also have glimpses of people in a system that tries to help someone like Mike, with him, who does not fall short. This is then juxtaposed at the times when he withdrew in his mind, with several striking sequences which take us deeply into what seems to be a cave far in the forest. It is a fascinating way of expressing peace that Mike wants the most is not able to stay very long. No matter what he does, he still feels several kilometers from his own world.

While Dickinson traces the adjustments and departures of Mike trying to imagine a new future for himself, he holds a lot on his history. We are told briefly that he is adopted and hears the reaction of a probable parental figure at the other end of a phone call he makes prison, although it is essentially that. Everything else comes from the delicate and devastating performance of Dillane.

It is not a question of making it pleasant to the taste with us, as if only people who do not deserve compassion. We can rather take the complicated person and always worry about him at each stage. It is an intimate performance. It is a complete character that Dillane and Dickinson built from zero, where the small details of the way they react to things can tear when you expect the least.

This includes a scene where he is not even at the center of the frame, but out of development at a critical moment. As you see it, lift your head in response to the information given to it, put it back again and stay motionless, you can feel each overwhelming book of the tension that is played in it. It is a remarkable moment that Dickinson built which also marks the moment when it all starts to collapse. Where the lower films could make it feel like an banal inevitability, “Urchin” was so patient in the accumulation that this makes the previous fall even more devastating.

This extends to the final sequence that blows the doors of the whole film. This is where “trainspotting” is again like an influence, but there is also a fantastic final game which is closer to something like “Aftersun”. Just as these are high points of praise, Dickinson also does a lot that he can call his. He cement the film as a breathtaking work of overwhelming humanity and beginnings for ages.