Few directors have been as consistent as Ken Loach in addressing present day realities. His six-decade long career constitutes a long-running and ongoing dialogue with contemporary Britain and its place in the wider world, as though Loach himself was a kind of prestigious television serial or public broadcast service: Previously on Ken Loach. I’ll resist calling him a brand—that would be too much for this man of the left—but with Loach you know what you’re going to get.
From the start Loach’s films were aligned with the working class (Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow, Kes). As such, he is the dominant figure in British social realism. It would be easy to call him an institution were it not for the fact that he seems immune to such praise. But there is no escaping the fact that Loach is a big-name director. What is most remarkable is the absence of any vanity. Loach’s directorial reticence is both his signature and his strength: the unobtrusive camera, the unadorned style, the feeling for people and place. He has a documentary maker’s eye and a dramatist’s heart. In that regard, he reminds me of Elia Kazan. But whereas Kazan made stars of the wounded, Loach’s people are all too human. So while Ricky Tomlinson (Riff Raff, Raining Stones) or Martin Compston (Sweet Sixteen) are rightly praised for their performances in Loach’s films, it is their characters’ stories that we remember afterwards: people not stars. Some might disagree. Film critic Mark Cousins argues convincingly that cinema as a medium is inherently right-wing, and that leftist filmmakers cannot help but be affected, even Loach: “Loach’s minimally lit and designed films make heroic the Peter Mullens, Crissy Rocks and Robert Carlyles of their stories.” But making heroes is not the same as making stars, and the left has always loved its heroes. I’d daresay Loach is one of them, but this most self-effacing of great directors would probably tell me to bugger off. Even his political epics (Land and Freedom, The Wind That Shakes the Barley) are shorn of grandeur. Loach’s subjects are, of course, important to him—close to his heart—but his style is strictly lower-case.
—MM
Running From The Reels 