Talk about good timing. Having just scored the Palme d’Or at Cannes for I, Daniel Blake – he also won it in 2006 for The Wind that Shakes the Barley – Ken Loach receives the documentary treatment with this very fine overview of a chequered career.
Tellingly, and emblematically, opening scenes feature Rebecca O’Brien, producer of I, Daniel Blake, outlining why it won’t get funding from Channel 4 (“commercial potential”) or the BBC (“politically difficult”).
Spoiler alert: Louise Osmond’s warm, engaging portrait of the 79-year-old ends with the characteristically soft-spoken film-maker murmuring the word “Bastards”, with a little smile. This is entirely in keeping with what his many collaborators have been telling us for an hour-and-a-half. “He doesn’t seem to be a danger to anyone,” explains Tony Garnett, Loach’s producer for some 13 years: “He’d seem at home at a vicar’s tea party and yet, there he is, probably the most subversive director this country has ever had.”
Loach famously likes to shoot his films chronologically in order to elicit “truthful” responses from his actors. Faced with a considerable body of work and eight decades of biography, Osmond prefers temporal skips: we’ve already covered Loach’s Wednesday Plays for the BBC when we skip back to Oxford, where the son of a factory foreman encounters “the youths who expected to rule the world, and who did”.
Later, when we're deep into Loach's lean years – his documentaries were often pulled from TV schedules – Versus brings us back to the time Loach, then a young actor, was Kenneth Williams' understudy.
For 50 years Loach’s films have been consistently socially and politically engaged. Yet this most admirable activist-artist is even more complicated than the quiet firebrand described by his colleagues. He berates himself for making commercials during his leanest years: “It sits really badly on my conscience that I did one for McDonalds,” he squirms. His quiet, restrained account of the death of his son in a car accident is genuinely heartbreaking: “a stone in your stomach that never goes away”.
Distressed right-wing headlines ask “Why does Ken Loach loathe his country so much?” and decry his “most IRA film”, while his daughter Emma tells us her father loves musicals: “The more camp and glossy the better.”
Chalk it up to Marxist dialectics.
