Following a foray into commercial cinema with the political thriller HIDDEN AGENDA, British director Ken Loach returned to his roots in social realism with a bittersweet comedy-drama about London construction workers.
The film's slight plot focuses on Stevie (Robert Carlyle), who moves to London from his home in Glasgow, where he has served a prison term for theft. Stevie finds work with an unscrupulous building contractor whose disregard for safe working conditions is balanced by his willingness to hire
laborers without checking their backgrounds or identities. This suits Stevie's colorful, polyglot co-workers, most of whom use false names in order to continue drawing welfare benefits.
Loach has made an insightful, quietly affecting study of people who, amidst the economic wreckage of post-Thatcherite Britain, have been reduced to outcasts in their own country--converting rundown buildings into condos for the rich, while having to break into abandoned buildings for homes of
their own. Using a neo-documentary style and improvisational acting techniques, the director has brought emotional resonance and humor to a script by the late Bill Jesse, a struggling comedy writer and playwright who had been supporting himself as a construction laborer; he died shortly after the
film's completion. The result is an aptly moving epitaph, mining both poignancy and humor from its ostensibly grim subject matter. This English-language film was released in a subtitled version in the US, which is a big help for American viewers attempting to unravel the crazy quilt of
accents--Scottish, Liverpudlian, Cockney, African--that weave the story together. leave a comment
