Hope had two beautiful daughters: the anger to rage against reality and the courage to face it and try to change it. He wrote San Augustin Just over 1,600 years ago, and although he probably doesn’t much like being associated with those words (like a good atheist, he distrusts mystics) these words perfectly summarize his career. Ken Loach. Throughout his career spanning six decades, the director has The great representative of British social realism, The cinematographic equivalent of what Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy represented in literature.
Your career should be understood as a persistent and challenging project, one that devotes body and soul to it. giving voice to the excluded, exploited and dispossessed; those who are unemployed or have lost their homes; Those who are somehow exposed to the injustices of the capitalist system and bureaucracy, its insidious violence, its ability to hide and reinvent itself, and its tendency to constantly renew itself. racism and fascism. If capitalism constantly outdoes itself in finding new ways to oppress ordinary people, Loach has struggled to defeat it with equally inexhaustible tenacity.
A retired rebel
A few months ago Loach announced: His 29th fictional feature film ‘The Old Oak’ is probably the last film of his career. “Realistically, I have to admit that it would be difficult for me to shoot another one.”he assured then. “I am losing my physical abilities: my short-term memory is weakening and my eyesight is quite bad.” Although he has never been as emphatic as he is now, the truth is that he had threatened to retire both in 2014 and in 2019 after hosting ‘Jimmy’s Hall’, angry critiques of the Catholic Church.
He might have been enjoying a much-deserved retirement for years, but social inequalities and abuses inspired him again and again, like the old gunman who strapped his pistol to his waist for the final duel. camera. “The economic system is dragging us into the abyss,” he says.. “Big companies have shown no sign that they are willing to cut profits to stop climate change. The only thing that can prevent disaster is revolution”.
North West England portrait painter
The new film is the third part of the trilogy completed by ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016), which condemned the flaws of the British welfare system, and ‘Sorry We Missed You’ (2019), which dealt with slavery caused by the economy. on demand – and fully realized A particularly poor area in the north-west of England. The action takes place around the last bar left open in a small town, a former mining community, where persuasiveness is tested. a group of Syrian immigrants In search of a new home, xenophobic attitudes emerge among the population and are intended to condemn the policies of successive conservative governments.
“Refugees from the Middle East were in the most disadvantaged part of the country”, recalls Loach. “And this inevitably created tension between two communities: one devastated by the decisions of its political leaders, the other traumatized by war.” The film also deals with what, in the director’s opinion, comes out of this conflict. The event that devastated his country: The miners’ strike that took place between 1984 and 1985This resulted in the hardening of conservative measures by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “When the wells were closed, people were left to their fate because ‘Thatcherism’ was cutting social benefits. This was the beginning of the end”.
Pioneer of non-professional players
The housing problems depicted by ‘The Old Oak’ are not too different from those raised by Loach in ‘Cathy Come Home’ (1966), one of nine documentary series he directed for the BBC at the beginning of his career. This book also includes ‘Three Open Sundays’ (1965), which focuses on the death penalty, and ‘At the Crossroads’ (1965), which deals with abortion. He made his debut as a film director with the story “Poor Cow” (1967). An abused woman who joins a criminal gang after her husband’s imprisonment and two years later he released ‘Cut’ (1969), perhaps his best film. This film portrayed both the touching relationship between a young man and a hawk and the shortcomings of the education system.
Since then, Loach has continued to think about the same problems, looking for new ways to tackle them, always seeking the highest possible level of originality and often relying on non-professional actors those who interpret variations of their real lives for the big screen. In ‘Riff-Raff’ (1991) he did this by focusing on the world of construction, and in ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) he portrayed a man trying to overcome alcoholism; In ‘Lady Bird, Lady Bird’ (1994) he explored a woman’s struggle to stop social services from taking her children away from her, tackled juvenile delinquency in ‘Happy Sixteen’ (2002) and worked with temporary employment agencies in ‘In a Free World’ (2007). He looked at his sinister methodology.
McDonald’s advertisement
To this day, meanwhile, he finds himself at odds with curators, financiers, and censors; Many documentaries he directed in the 80s were banned; He was baselessly accused of being anti-British and anti-Semitic.Although he never received a dollar from Hollywood, he often had to resort to foreign money to make his films; But in 1990 He had to place an ad at McDonald’s to pay the bills.
Since the mid-90s, Loach has worked with screenwriter Paul Laverty, who has written 14 of his last 15 films, including ‘The Wind That Rocked the Barley’ (2007), which won him the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ), about the beginnings of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and ‘I, Daniel Blake’. “I wouldn’t have been able to move forward without Paul,” the director admits. “We have always been motivated by the same stories and always asked ourselves the question: How can we contribute to creating a more just society?”
“Hope is a political thing”
In recent years Loach and Laverty’s films have become increasingly didactic.and characters giving lectures instead of exchanging dialogue; They’ve been accused of making films as predictable and Manichaean as Marvel’s. But this crudeness of the narrative invites it to be understood as a way of confronting the enemy with his own weapon, in other words, A deliberate cinematic response to the rudeness and arrogance with which the ‘Conservatives’ implement their policies; and in every case, even his most schematic films pack an emotional punch that can choke a person.
Unlike its two companions in the trilogy, perhaps inevitably his final work, ‘The Old Oak’, displays generous doses of what St. Augustine saw as essential emotion. “Hope is a political thing,” says Loach. “If you have hope, you can find a way forward and have the energy to follow it. And this hope is achieved through solidarity.” In a scene from the new movie, someone says: “If the working classes realized the power they have when they come together, they could change the world.”; Some of the most striking moments in the director’s cinema are those that show gestures of support and kindness towards helpless people, functioning as temporary interruptions to the rule of capital and thus promising a better world.