Film - Charlotte Raven finds a lot to shout about in the latest Ken Loach
There is always a lot of shouting in Ken Loach films. Most of his characters are in pain, and this begets terrible anger - at the world, at themselves and at their loved ones, who are often in the same position. You know it is self-defeating when they do it, that it won't help them win back their lover or their children or the dignity seized from them by poverty, but there's nothing you can do to stop them. The audience just has to sit there as a gaunt parade of the downtrodden and dejected F-and-blind their way into more trouble than they started off with. Unable to bear their bullheaded inability to learn from their mistakes, I always itch to give them the benefit of my Jack Straw-like take on their troubles.
"You're not helping yourself, you know," I'm thinking, as the woman who had her babies taken away by "the social" (in Ladybird Ladybird) kicks up another rumpus when they come to assess her fitness as a mother. If the pickled Scotsman in My Name is Joe had only listened to the simple dictum "another drink never solved anything", he could have escaped from his cycle of self-destruction. But it is never that simple. Loach's films are about the anguish of lives led beyond the reach of the political fantasy of "personal responsibility", by people who are not equipped to take the risks that are their only chance of changing the script.
By comparison with these hopeless cases, the characters in Bread and Roses are lucky, in that Loach at least throws them a line. The community of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles on whom the film focuses may be as poor and downtrodden as any of his other working-class characters, but, unlike their British forebears, they are allowed access to a struggle that, incredibly, achieves its objectives. I kept waiting for a catch, and there was one, but it didn't stop the film being basically a David-and-Goliath story of success against all odds.
Maybe the Californian sun has gone to Loach's head. Respectful as he is to the true story of the campaign of the Los Angelean janitors for fair pay and conditions, there is real heat and warmth in the telling, and a clearer than usual sense of what it is about the human spirit that makes it worth standing up for. The protagonists are much nicer than they usually are, and it's great to see Loach work with a proper heroine - the beautiful Maya (Pilar Padilla), who starts off the film pretty coolly, as a wetback who gives a bad man his comeuppance, and continues to blossom throughout as her hot-headed temperament is moulded by political awareness.
Like all Loach's films, Bread and Roses is political in the broadest sense of the word. This is the result of the director's refusal to simplify, rather than his subject matter. There are countless films about politics which are no more truly political than your bog-standard multiplex romance. The Contender is the most recent example, a work that promoted an agenda rather than applying a political sensibility to the operations it observed.
Loach, by contrast, never allows the issues he deals with to stand between him and the job of analysing his characters' feelings and motivations. The relentlessness with which he examines the forces that form personality, his commitment to providing explanations for the actions of his least appealing subjects - these are the traits that show what being a political artist really means.
In Bread and Roses, Maya's sister, Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), stands in a long line of embittered and hardened Loach women. She also works as a janitor, but, unlike her sister, believes the possible consequences of collective action are much too great to justify the risk. This lack of faith and its corollary - her willingness to use the dispute to increase her own stock with the bosses - hardly endears her to anyone, and for much of the film we have her down as a poker-faced old bitch. But that is not the whole story. When the tearful Maya confronts her sister about why she has betrayed her colleagues to the management, Rosa tells her that the money she had sent home to the family to keep them, when their father left, was earned through prostitution, and that she still "fucked" even now to pay her husband's medical bills.
It is a tribute to Loach that this revelation doesn't jar. He is so good at containing the drama that disasters that look too Loachy on the page never seem hyperbolic on the screen. His great skill lies in making us believe stuff that, in other films, would seem like dramatic cliche, reminding us that the stereotypes of modern narratives do owe a debt to reality. Sometimes it is easy to forget that real people still inhabit these roles. We are so used to seeing tragic whores in more or less camp situations that it takes a clever man to make the idea of doing that for money seem genuinely shocking.
Bread and Roses (15) is on release at selected cinemas
Charlotte Raven is the NS film critic
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