Shaun de Waal British movie of the week
Since the Sixties, left-wing director Ken Loach has focused on working-class life in Britain, using an uncompromising style of social realism to do it.
He often uses non-actors, and he won’t let his cast see the whole script beforehand – instead, he gives it to them piecemeal in brown paper bags.
Loach also likes to spring surprises on his actors, while the cameras roll, to get unrehearsed reactions. “Everyone was kept on their toes,” Loach said of his last production; “they never knew quite where the film ended and life began.”
Which is precisely the effect of Loach’s new film, My Name Is Joe. You forget you’re watching actors and feel you’re eavesdropping on real people’s lives, in all their messiness, with their traumas, their ambivalences, as well as the humour that rises unforced from life’s absurdities. Reinforcing the impact of this is the movie’s quasi-documentary look (though Loach never frames a shot badly), the script by Paul Laverty, which was researched in the streets of Glasgow’s poorest areas, and the superb performances.
Peter Mullan plays Joe, a recovering alcoholic with little to cling to beyond the hopeless football team he manages. He meets a social worker, Sarah (Louise Goodall), and a tentative romance develops. But can such a romance survive the vicissitudes of grinding poverty and lives constantly threatening to tip over the brink of criminality? That is the question the movie asks – and then refuses to answer in an easy way. Remarkably, the cumulative effect is not depressing.
Mullan and Goodall are both excellent, setting before us complicated, conflicted individuals battling with urgent problems thrown up by their class, their place in a particular society. That society is being examined here via the characters, and it is judged more severely than they are.
The Scottish accents (like Loach’s earlier film Riff-Raff, My Name Is Joe will get subtitles in the United States) are dense enough to make Trainspotting sound like the BBC World Service. But they, too, are part of Loach’s meticulous yet unstylised naturalism: one learns to listen intently.