Like becalmed invaders from space, cooling towers loom over the sour meadows outside Bradford in England. A mist is gathered in the air and it matches the hum of a nearby power station. But sheep and horses graze in the meadows and some of the wild boys in the area go there trying to steal the precious power cable. It is a dangerous game because of the cable’s high voltage. But the bright metal inside is worth big money—wads of notes—from Kitten, the swaggering boss of a scrap metal yard. There are two boys, Arbor and Swifty—the one like a fox, the other a bear in the making—who take the chance. The Selfish Giant is the story of their friendship (the one good thing in their lives), and it will find its climax in the dank wasteland of those meadows.

Bradford is an old city in Yorkshire, in the north. It was once a hub of the textile industry, but that is past now. The factories are closed, some are just abandoned, and unemployment in the area can be as high as twenty-five percent. About a quarter of the population is Asian. Arbor is a lively wreck—a lean, gingery boy, with attention deficit disorder, inclined to do without his drugs because he despises anything in his society that claims to be caring or helpful. His chum, Swifty, is older, bulkier, gentler, and kinder, and he tries to help Arbor for reasons he hardly bothers to work out. When we first see them, Arbor is on the floor beneath his bed, beating at the box spring and crying out in anger and frustration. Swifty urges peace on him in just the way he talks to horses. Swifty is a natural with those animals and he dreams of being the rider in sulky races the locals run on the highways with cars threatening the horses. That is how he knows Kitten, the most obvious selfish giant in the film.

This is the second feature film by Clio Barnard—three years ago she made The Arbor, also set in Bradford, equally devoted to underprivileged lives and fascinated by language. One of the most notable things about this new film is that, though filmed in a version of the English language, it has subtitles in America. We are lucky. The film went without subtitles in Britain, where many struggled to hear what was being said. These boys talk in broken roars and gasps, and their constant foul-mouthing is just one sign of their hopelessness. Their school has given up on both of them. They are excluded because they seem too wild and indifferent to education. But there have always been streets and parts of town in Bradford that the city disowns and starves of money. It’s a fucking tough world.

The Selfish Giant refers to an Oscar Wilde story, but the natural affinity in this magnificent and heartbreaking film is to Dickens. Arbor is a Dodger, but with precious little art. Kitten is a modern Fagin. But the London of Oliver Twist has given way to a view of the north of England that sees the dereliction, the disowning, and the tragic bitterness. (Yes, Arbor is a talisman name for Barnard, but it is also a source of rueful irony, for nothing in these two films has provided anything like the security and nurturing we associate with the word “arbor.” The boy Arbor could as easily be called “Loner” or “Dickhead.”)

The Arbor was an unprecedented film. At first it looked like a documentary about Andrea Dunbar, a young woman who escaped Bradford to write plays for London. She flourished briefly but Bradford and booze called her back, and she was dead of a brain hemorrhage after a night at the pub when she was only twenty-nine. She had had three children by three different men, and much of The Arbor consists of sound interviews with them and other people who knew Andrea, with the words being lip-synched by actors. I know, this seems too odd for its own good—but The Arbor is not just innovative, it is also unbearably touching, and one of those films that kicks the art of film forward. The ancient orthodoxy that sound and picture must always be married is now as broken and dubious as marriage itself.