Loach is no slouch

[With the Clark auditorium off-line during the latest phase of construction, and all programming moved or canceled, the future of film programs at the Clark is murkier than ever.  On the personal side, I continue struggling to catch up with various categories of film-reviewing, but one group of films I’ve seen lately lends itself to stand-alone consideration.  So here’s an appetizer, for the banquet to come.]

Perhaps no director is more identified with the democratic Left than Ken Loach, both politically and aesthetically.  His films portray the antithesis to Thatcherite Britain, and an alternative to a soul-dead Labour Party.  Though censored and stymied at various points in his career, he has established an impressive filmography, with which I have been catching up.

  

I’ve always liked Ken Loach, found him highly simpatico, but had succumbed to the prevalent view that he’s an eat-your-peas sort of filmmaker, good for you but not much fun to watch.  Oddly, I lost track of him after seeing a particularly good movie, Sweet Sixteen (2002), the culmination of a solid dozen years worth of films, after he had struggled for two decades to secure work and to get his films seen.

Of crucial importance in that run of good films was the development of a continuing relationship with screenwriter Paul Laverty, beginning with Carla’s Song in 1996.  Laverty had been a lawyer in Glasgow, and worked in Nicaragua for a human rights organization, which informed the theme of that first collaboration.  Many of their subsequent films shared the Glaswegian location and dialect, which makes subtitles necessary for nearly every one of their films, each of which deals with marginalized and exploited people, working class or worse.

My Name is Joe (1998) and Bread and Roses (2000) led up to Sweet Sixteen, though Loach maintained a continuity of intent from working with other writers on Riff-Raff (1991), Raining Stones (1993), Ladybird Ladybird (1994), and Land and Freedom (1995), all of which I had seen and admired.  Subsequently, Loach seemed to get a lot of love from the Cannes Film Festival, but only spotty distribution in the U.S.

I picked up the thread of his career by starting with a film that I’d been meaning to see, more out of duty than expectation of pleasure, ever since it was re-issued by the Criterion Collection several years ago.  Kes (1969, MRQE-92, NFX) was Loach’s second feature film, after a successful career in British television, and remains his most universally admired, despite the nearly impenetrable Yorkshire accents.  It tells the story of a young boy, bullied at home and at school, who finds companionship and purpose in the training of a kestrel, and is really made by the intimacy that develops between boy and bird.  In Loach’s typical practice of mixing nonactors with professionals, he found a gem in David Bradley as the boy, and with cinematographer Chris Menges developed the naturalistic, observational style of filmmaking that would become his trademark, much influenced by the likes of DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves.  Perversely, the Criterion disk lacks subtitles, but you can miss much of the dialogue and still be moved by the intensity and sincerity of this painful but rewarding film.  It made me want to see more Ken Loach, and I was surprised to see what I had missed.

The Navigators (2001, NFX) was another labor-based story, about the privatization of British Rail, following hard on the heels of Blood and Roses, which had been about a strike by Latino janitorial workers in L.A.  As always with Loach, the hardscrabble realities of working life are balanced by the humor of camaraderie and circumstance.  One after another, a tight crew of railroad workers take buyouts, with one profit-squeezing owner succeeding another.  Then the boys continue working, without union protection, as independent contractors, to disastrous result.

In subsequent films, the balance tilts more toward humor without losing the didactic intent.  Ae Fond Kiss (2004, MC-65, NFX) might even be mistaken for a romantic comedy, but the romance is complicated by Romeo and Juliet-type conflict, between a Pakistani son of Muslim immigrants and an Irish schoolteacher in Glasgow.  Loach fans were unimpressed by unprecedented sex scenes and Loach foes bemoaned the characteristic schematics and liberal pieties, but I liked the whole thing, the realism of relationships, the satire of bigotry and narrowness from both sides, but most especially a winning lead performance from Eva Birthistle.

Looking for Eric (2010, MC-66, NFX) continues Loach’s comedic approach, in a project initiated by the eponymous Eric Cantona, a great hero of the Manchester United football team.  Not that I had ever heard of him before seeing this film, but he’s easily translatable into a comparable figure like Reggie Jackson of the New York Yankees, both a big-time star and a character.  He’s the idol of a down-on-his-luck postman, who many years ago abandoned the love of his life and their infant daughter out of sheer cold feet.  He later married another woman, who abandoned him in turn, along with two stepsons by other men.  He comes back in contact with his lost love through shared care of a granddaughter, and seeks guidance from the life-sized poster of his hero on his bedroom wall.  In a Play It Again, Sam twist, the French footballer appears in the flesh and dispenses romantic advice and life wisdom from a Gallic sporting perspective.  The film loses its focus on some interesting relationships to become a comic revenge caper, but remains rather endearing.

The balance of sweet to sour shifts even more in The Angels’ Share (2013, MC-66, NFX), though like the scotch whiskey in which the story is steeped, it’s got bite as well as smoothness.  And another real find in a nonprofessional actor, Paul Brannigan, who could be the boy from Kes after more years of hard knocks, or the boy from Sweet Sixteen after a further descent into violent criminality.  In this case, the pregnancy of his girlfriend generates a wish to reform, and he winds up on a community service work gang instead of in prison.  A kindly overseer interests the boy in whiskey and he turns out to have an educated nose for spirits.  But being the lad he is, and the world being stacked against him as it is, he puts his knowledge to use by organizing a liquor heist.  Here the caper seems a bit more organic, and the title pleasingly metaphoric, indicating the portion of whiskey that evaporates from the aging cask.

This succession of films led me back to The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2007, MC-82, NFX), which won the top prize at Cannes and I reviewed indifferently at its release.  I definitely appreciated the film more the second time around, from the lovely Irish countryside to the brutal conflict between two brothers, who originally fight together against the British but then wind up on opposite sides of the Irish Civil War.  It all seemed much clearer to me on second viewing, even down to the highly Loachian debate among the partisans about socialism vs. nationalism, which echoes from Land and Freedom, his film about the Spanish Civil War.  It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking film, as long as you are awake to its concerns.

I appreciate Loach for wearing his left-wing politics on his sleeve, and also for his self-effacing approach to filmmaking, in which he tries to get the camera out of the way of the actors and just to let them act naturally, going so far as to shoot in sequence without letting the actors know what’s coming next, so he can catch their spontaneous reactions to surprising developments, whether they are trained thespians or beginners whose background matches their characters’.  His is a form of socialist realism that I can get behind. 

[Here's a good link for more information on Ken Loach's career.]