REALITY, COOKED & RAW -- 'Ratcatcher' & 'Series 7: The Contenders'.

Ratcatcher opens with a slow-motion close-up of a child spinning around in a lace curtain, and it's unclear at first whether we're seeing rapture or torture, suffocation or play; there's beauty here, the image announces, but harm as well. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's gritty debut film takes place in a 1970s Glasgow housing project that a lengthy sanitation strike has left overrun with garbage and rats--"notorious vectors of disease," a TV news spot puts it. The environment is one of menacing poverty, a world of scabbed and filthy plaster, boarded-up windows, and a disused canal running along one edge of the project. Danger lurks; and when two boys roughhouse in the murky water, one of them drowns, leaving the other, twelve-year-old James Gillespie, with a burden of horror, bewilderment, and guilt.

Days later we watch James (William Eadie) foray back into the water, to where the bottom drops away and his friend disappeared. He's trying to fathom cause and effect, to understand where tragedy comes from and where it leads; and the attempt soon encompasses his entire life. It's as if he is seeing things for the first time, through the eyes of loss. His father drinks. His teenage sister may be sneaking off to meet someone. The older neighborhood boys practice pointless cruelty upon animals and gang sex on a passive fourteen-year-old girl, Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen). Adulthood is a state of failure and lethargy, and family fun on a Saturday night means watching the old man make a

drunken pass at your Ma while Tom Jones gyrates on the telly. Pitilessly Ramsay zeroes in on the child's view, focusing on the spindle of drool that hangs from Dad's mouth as he passes out on the couch, bringing a Polanski-like touch of the grotesque to the portrayal of James's estrangement.

This is a terse and lonely movie, assembled out of images that lodge themselves with stubborn beauty in the mind's eye. That you could take the dialogue away and still have the essence of Ratcatcher is a tribute to Ramsay and her director of photography, Alwin Kuchler, whose camera makes seemingly innocuous images speak volumes. When James tries to retrieve Margaret Anne's glasses, tossed into the canal by the toughs, he can't quite reach them, and the failure suggests a childhood in which every saving gesture falls short. Another day, James hops a city bus and rides it to the end of the line, a field out in the country where new housing is under construction. Workers have gone home for the day, and James plays at the deserted site--first as laborer, hoisting a few shovelfuls of dirt, then homeowner. Venturing inside, he stares in awe at the gleaming fixtures; he pees in the new toilet (not yet connected!), and lies down with a sigh in the gleaming tub. Back outside, he romps through a neighboring wheat field, the image beautifully framed through the bathroom window.

Short on plot, long on character and atmosphere, Ratcatcher is a dark portrayal of urban childhood, tinged with pathos. Some of the best scenes take up James's budding friendship with Margaret Anne. Drafted as a lookout while the older boys have at her, he feels the sympathy of a fellow outcast, and the two gradually forge an affection that is the closest thing to love in Ratcatcher. It is Ramsay's brilliant insight to have a friendship begun amid drastic sexual degradation find novel forms of intimacy, as when James combs the lice out of Margaret Anne's hair ("That's the wee beast there," he enthuses, holding out the comb--"See it?"). In the film's most affecting scene, the two sneak a bath together at her parents' flat. Soaping each other up, naked and giggling like mad, they're in a nether world between childhood and adolescence, their jolly, giddy play graced with an unconscious awareness of sex. It is an astonishing moment, one that rescues innocence and restores the girl to her childhood; and American viewers can't but feel a passing despair that such a scene--both the idea itself and the logistics of filming it, with young actors--is all but unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic.

A coming-of-age film that charts the advent of death, sex, and the fallibility of parents, Ratcatcher treads well-trafficked ground. But Ramsay manages to make it new, investing the ugly with fascination and the mundane with a glow of joy. We're used to seeing an anonymous new suburban development as an emblem of ennui, for instance, but here we encounter it transformed into paradise, the gleaming porcelain bathroom a bower of delight in the eyes of a child for whom cleanliness is a fantasy. As James, first-time actor William Eadie belongs right up there with Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and Anton Glanzelius in My Life as a Dog, to name two of my favorite child performances. Because children's emotions are so often nonverbal, films of childhood need a face. Eadie has one, all right: His angular visage is all wariness and hurt; he looks malnourished and scared, and tragically adult.

I haven't seen so bleak a portrayal of childhood since Pelle the Conqueror; and yet--unlike Pelle--Ratcatcher isn't determined to make you weep. It's too austere for that, too interested, in an almost clinical way, in human nature; when we see kids clamber up, laughing, to look into a hearse, their wholly amoral curiosity turns death into a game. Often appalling, Ratcatcher resists being heartbreaking, and its detachment comes off as a strength. It makes you look where you don't want to, and captures a way of seeing that keeps coming back to you, hours and days later, like a dream. In the end, Ramsay pushes her film's grim determinism a bit too far--further, anyway, than I wanted her to. But even a gifted young filmmaker needs something left to learn.

Space forbids spending much time on Series 7: The Contenders, Daniel Minahan's frenetic parody of reality-based television. And how much time would you really want to spend? It's bad enough having the shows themselves. (Actually, it's alarming to note that a parody of "Survivor" can score points without one's having ever watched an episode of the original: that's how saturated the mainstream media are with this stuff.) Minahan's spoof mixes "Survivor" with live police shows, like "Cops," then takes the concept to its absurd extreme. "Real people in real danger," is the bold motto of "The Contenders," "where the only prize is the prize that counts--your life!" Contestants are armed, then unloosed to hunt each other across the malls and living rooms of suburban America. Tonight's cast of killers? A nurse, an elderly curmudgeon, a spoiled teenage girl, an unemployed asbestos-removal worker, a moody artist, and our current champ, Dawn (Brooke Smith), a pregnant woman whose bouts of tearful reluctance yield to bellicose trash-talking come trigger time.

Complete with cheesy music and breathless voice-over--"Will Dawn be able to eliminate Jeff--or will her feelings for him get in the way?"--Series 7 plays off its blatant violence against the squishy intimacy of contestant interviews that elicit the full range of therapytainment: distraught confessions, screaming bouts with siblings, heartfelt testimonials to one's own inner strength ("My faith has seen me through," says Connie, the nurse, shortly after blowing away another contender with a high-powered rifle). We watch the achievement-crazed parents of the teenager ferry her in their SUV to her target's house, help with her bulletproof vest, and urge the kid on: "This guy's an easy mark, honey. Now just go in there and do some damage!" (A casting note--that's New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's estranged wife, Donna Hanover, as Mom, screaming "Got your guns? Go, go, go!")

Satirizing a TV show is harder than, say, satirizing rock musicians (This Is Spinal Tap) or dog owners (Best in Show); and the, um, scattershot humor of Series 7 misses as often as it hits. There's a basic problem when the reality you're targeting is reality TV. As I sit down to write this, tonight's news is recapping a lawsuit against an MTV reality show ("Jackass") on behalf of a boy who emulated one segment's stunt of covering himself with raw meat and barbecuing himself, along with a second lawsuit--for "emotional distress"--by two girl contestants who claim they were "mooned...and later spattered with feces" during the taping of another show, "Dude, That Sucks!" And you say you want to do parody?