In its naturalism, ''The Scar'' looks back four decades to England's ''kitchen sink'' realism in which a new generation of filmmakers, rejecting the upper-class gentility and patriotic gloss of writers like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, turned their attention to the postwar despair of the working class.īut there's a crucial difference between the social outlook of a movie like ''The Scar'' and the work of the ''angry young men'' of the 1950's and 60's. ''The Scar'' is a high point of the new series ''Changing the Guard,'' a survey of recent British films (11 features and 5 shorts) presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, that begins screenings today at the Walter Reade Theater. We also meet May's estranged alcoholic husband, Tony (Brian Hogg), a shattered former coal miner who lives by himself in a shack. But if the two are on opposite sides of a political divide, the movie also shows them to be soul mates who share a salty humor and a fondness for the same 1950's show tunes. By falling in love with Roy, May, who is having severe physical problems connected with menopause, is, in effect, sleeping with the enemy. May has two bitter teen-age children looking for a foothold in a community that disintegrated after the British Government closed the local mine and left the town in economic ruins. Roy manages a nearby private open-cast mine run by a development company with plans to revitalize the region. May was once a fiery activist in the 1984-85 miners strike.
The relationship that embodies those strains is a love affair that develops between May (Charlie Hardwick) and Roy (Bill Speed), two proud working-class Britons now in their 50's.
Nowhere more than in ''The Scar,'' a magnificently acted love story set in a desolate coal-mining town in County Durham on the northeastern coast of England, are the country's growing pains portrayed with more excruciating exactitude.
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