For more than five decades Ken Loach has made powerful, realistic films about topics Hollywood steadfastly ignores. From “Cathy Come Home’s” bleak look at the inflexibility of the British welfare system to his twenty-fourth feature, “I, Daniel Blake,” the director has never wavered in his uncompromising approach to presenting social commentary on screen.
English comedian Dave Johns plays the title character, a Newcastle woodworker who suffers a heart attack on the job. He’s determined to get back to work as soon as possible but a paperwork snafu keeps him at home while his own computer illiteracy—“If you give me a plot of land I’ll build you a house but I’ve never been near a computer,” he says—stalls his plan to appeal his capability assessment. His once steady income reduced to dribs and drabs he protests, spray-painting, “I, Daniel Blake, demand my appeal date before I starve,” on a building. He is arrested and released but still waiting for his appeal date and the dignity of being treated like a human being, not a number on a file.
“I, Daniel Blake” is bleak. From Daniel’s grim spirit-breaking situation to Katie (Hayley Squires), a desperate single mom who prostitutes herself to make money to feed her kids, the movie is a portrait of nightmarish bureaucracy, privatized public services and despair. Brimming with the filmmaker’s passion and anger, it’s a movie that doesn’t offer much in the way of hope but plenty in the way of outrage. Loach’s approach is unsentimental, naturalistic. The first half contains some dark humour as Daniel tries to navigate Kafka-esque rules and regulations to collect his “jobseeker’s allowance” but by the time Katie is staving of starvation with stolen beans things take a bleak turn.
Richard talks Cannes and Xavier Dolan with the Canadian Press.
“I think he’s got probably a pretty good shot certainly at being taken seriously as a contender, even thought he’s up against the who’s who of international filmmakers like Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Verhoeven, Sean Penn,” says Toronto-based film reviewer Richard Crouse.
“There are a lot of people here that are working at a very high level, but I’d suggest that Xavier Dolan is working at just as high a level.”
The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the new film from director Ken Loach, does a remarkable thing. It puts a human face on a complicated political situation and makes hundreds of years of strife understandable and compelling.
Set in county Cork in the early 1920’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley is essentially the story of two brothers who start off as allies and end up as enemies. Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) is a young doctor about to leave his native Ireland to intern at a prestigious English hospital. His brother Teddy, a fierce nationalist and activist with a deep hatred of the English doesn’t want him to go and tries to convince him to stay and fight for a free Ireland.
Damien isn’t politically active, but a series of events change his mind. After witnessing the brutality of the Black and Tans, the British army who guarded Britain’s interests in Ireland, firsthand as they kill an Irish lad for refusing to speak English and beat a train conductor for refusing them entry on his vehicle, he joins his brother in the Irish Republican Army.
They work together for a time, until the Anglo-Irish Peace Agreement, which formed the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Empire, leaves them on different sides of the ideological fence. Teddy sides with the Free Staters who believe in compromise with the English, while Damien sticks with the IRA’s goal of a totally autonomous Ireland.
The film, with it’s brutal depiction of the English Army has already stirred up controversy since the film won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. In Britain right-wing newspaper columnists have compared director Ken Loach to both propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and Hitler and have suggested that the veteran filmmaker should leave the country if he hates it so much. Loach’s film likely won’t garner that kind of hysterical response when it opens here today, and nor should it.
The film doesn’t simply condemn the English, it showcases the plight of a suppressed people who wanted something very basic—the right to govern themselves. The film is uncompromising, showing brutal, ugly and realistic violence on both sides, but also speaks to conflict outside of Ireland. The depiction of torture in the film brings to mind Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo, suggesting that not much has changed in the intervening 85 years.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a well-acted, well-directed film which suggests that freedom isn’t always free.
After narrowly escaping jail, Scottish hell-raiser Robbie (Paul Brannigan) tries to create an honest life for his new family. Filmed and set in Glasgow, the first hour has a natural vibe; a rawness and realism that almost feel like a documentary but it switches in the latter half to a grimly funny caper film. It’s an unlikely feel good movie with good performances and loads of lyrical Scottish accents. The standout here is Brannigan who is so charismatic in his debut performance it’s hard to believe he’s never acted before stepping in front of ’s camera.
For more than five decades Ken Loach has made powerful, realistic films about topics Hollywood steadfastly ignores. From “Cathy Come Home’s” bleak look at the inflexibility of the British welfare system to his twenty-fourth feature, “I, Daniel Blake,” the director has never wavered in his uncompromising approach to presenting social commentary on screen.
