In the first of many self-consciously—but still genuinely—poetic shots in director Lynne Ramsay's auspicious first feature Ratcatcher, a poor young Glaswegian boy wraps himself in his mother's white drapes like a mummy, as if sensing his premature ossification. His death in a fetid canal a few minutes later is as cruel as it is inevitable, especially in light of other working-class films from Britain, where those who can't sing and dance their troubles away are pummeled by tragedy instead. But just when Ratcatcher seems overly content to bathe in Euro-art squalor, Ramsay will counter with a passage so breathtakingly lyrical and improbably optimistic, it shakes off the oppressive pall that too often passes for hard realism. Much like another major debut in 2000, David Gordon Green's George Washington, Ratcatcher makes poverty and death ever-present factors in the lives of its young characters. But both Green and Ramsay prefer to view childhood as a richer experience, rife with moments of humor, tenderness, and offhand beauty. Apart from the opening scenes, which play like a mini-Psycho in introducing and then swiftly killing off what appears to be the main character, the story is told through the eyes of 12-year-old William Eadie, a tough-minded boy living in a Glasgow apartment block in the early '70s. While a garbage workers' strike leaves piles of stinking refuse to fester in the summer heat, Eadie spends his afternoons at the nearby canal where his friend died as a result of their earlier horseplay. Nagged by occasional feelings of guilt, he skirts a band of young thugs, fosters a tentative relationship with a gawky misfit (Leanne Mullen) with skinned knees, and fantasizes about his family's possible transfer to the countryside. The sunny pastoral scenes, all the more gorgeous in contrast to the overcast city gloom, owe a debt to Terrence Malick's Days Of Heaven, as does a magical sequence with a mouse tied to a balloon that uses the same music ("Musica Poetica") as Malick's Badlands. Ramsay employs these lyrical bits sparingly, as a brief respite from the grim cycle of alcoholism and abuse in Eadie's family. But they make all the difference in setting Ratcatcher apart from others of its kind, supporting one of the few films about childhood to imagine and understand its vast possibilities.