Billy Elliot
Characters:
Billy Elliot, Jackie Elliot(father); Tony Elliot(Brother); Grandmother; Georgia Wilkinson ( ballet Teacher), Michael Caffrey (Billy??™s best friend)
Watch the opening sequence.
Orientation:
What information do we find out about the setting, characters and the time
Boxing/Ballet
* Billy gets nervous then he starts dancing
* Mirror image of Billy reflecting a symmetrical image of the ballet girls dancing opposite of him.
* In the ballet scene , the camera does a tracking shot of the girl??™s feet and stops when billy??™s boots appear. (shot from knees down)
* Fred Astaire ??“ Famous entertainer ( dancer in the late 60??™s) Grandma??™s favourite dancer.
* Billy has no intimate relationship with his older brother.
* Piano resembles Billy??™s dead mother, and later was destroyed for wood( survival)
* Music is set appropriately to the mood of the scene.
Billy is determined to succeed as a boxer because it is the done thing. Everybody boxes-or at least all the boys do. It is an accepted part of the culture. However, we see that Billy is not cut out for boxing when we see him in the ring. He plays acts with the other boxer, feigning a fight as though in a film. He has no real understanding of the boxing ethos and easily caught off guard and knocked down.
But far from being the end for him, it is actually the beginning. His punishment is to spend time with the punching bag. We watch him again playing??™ with the bag, ending up hugging it. This reflects the sense he has of??™ needing??™ support, a dependency that is related to the loss of his mother.
Returning the key he watches the girl??™s ballet. Something stirs in him-maybe a vague sense of his destiny. The camera catches him and his reflection looking on, suggesting that this is the divided Billy, one caught between what is the norm (boxing) and what is real for him (Ballet.)
We move to the next scene where he is actually in the group, but not quite of it. This shown visually aw we see him still in its boxing boots , and only catch the lower part of him struggling to fit in. But he is there, a strange place for a miner??™s son, and it seems to be right. It is both strange and exhilarating to ???Transgress??™, and in doing so both lose himself and find himself.
One representation of this is again the use of the mirror. Having stolen the book on ballet/dance moves from the mobile library he now uses the mirror to integrate rather than split.
The good thief – Why is Billy??™s thieving good and not bad
Librarian judges him, and forbids him to borrow a book from the grown up section. The ???mooning??™ distracts the librarian and allows Billy to steal the book.
The ???mooning??™ is also a physical representation of Billy??™s thought at the time.
Merry Xmas
This scene is deeply ironic. The father, Gran and Billy are sitting by the fire. They wish eachother ???Merry Xmas??™, but then the reality strikes the father. He seems to have lost everything .This includes the important piano, a potent symbol not just of her love and care but also of her hopes for the family, and especially her two children.
As he chopped up the piano he responds to billy??™s questions by saying ???she??™s dead.??™ The piano is smashed up in a vivid in many ways brutal scene. We can see this in a number of ways. It is a question of survival. Art, represented by the piano, is superfluous. We need shelter and food before we can afford the luxury of art. But an environment where something like a piano is treated as though it was just another object, or worse, an impediment, can suggest a brutal or ignorant approach to life. This sense is mediated by the ???Merry Xmas scene, where he weeps in a quiet sense of despair.
For Billy, too, this is the worst Xmas ever. Everything seems to be going from bad to worse. He feels the loss of the piano even more deeply that the others because he was the only one who used to play it.
At the Audition, Billy and his father were amazed by the scenery. Doubtful Billy feels anxious about the audition after and answers most questions with a ???dunno.??™ But the last answer he replies with
The Phoenix Bird — Bla Bla Writing
