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Ken Loach: Kes
Derek Malcolm
Thursday June 22, 2000
The Guardian
Ken Loach, the most modest
of directors, would probably say he had a lot to be modest
about - that his team deserves as much praise as he does.
And it is certainly true that you don't look for visually
imaginative work from Loach - though a writer in Sight
and Sound who suggested not long ago that Loach couldn't
even frame a shot properly was talking through the wrong
hole. In fact, Loach has always said that if you notice
the camerawork, there's something wrong with the story.
What he struggles to find
is the truth of any given situation through good casting,
scripts that often seem improvised but are not, and the
courage of his strong and unwavering left-leaning convictions.
In his best movies, Loach is able to turn the particular
into the universal and to appeal to audiences the world
over. Kes was such a film, as were Riff-Raff and Raining
Stones.
Kes is undoubtedly one of
the most remarkable films about education, or the lack
of it, ever made. Its main theme is perhaps naive - that
if you give a so-called dunce some kind of chance, the
result can surprise him and certainly his teachers. The
film's incidentals are as good as its main thrust, which
is never sentimentalised and maintains the right to be
angry as well as touching and funny.
Kes is the kestrel found and
trained by a young Barnsley boy from a broken home. The
boy, marvellously played by David Bradley, virtually
refuses education at the local school, which, though
inadequate, is never shown as wholly awful. Encouraged
by a sympathetic teacher, he finds some sort of hope
in his new interest, even though social deprivation is
always likely to stamp it out.
What adds immeasurably to
the film's power are the incidental scenes of school
life. There are two I'll never forget. One has a tiny
boy lining up outside the head's study, probably for
a beating, and crying his excuses. The tenderness displayed
here mixes with hilarity in a way very few directors
could even begin to achieve. The other has the ex-wrestler
Brian Glover as sports master taking his boys out on
to the field and, to the strains of the BBC's old Sports
Night signature tune, acting out a football fantasy that
has him behaving more like a child than his charges.
It's this sort of thing that
proclaims Loach a nearly great and certainly cherishable
director, since it does so much more than merely leaven
his political points with humour. Who, for instance,
can forget Ricky Tomlinson as a building worker in Riff-Raff,
climbing naked from a bath in a new building to face
a posse of surprised clients brought in by one of the
besuited developers?
This is not to downgrade the
serious - some say over-earnest - side of Loach's work,
which invariably deals with the injustice of uncaring
capitalism and invokes a properly socialist alternative.
It's just to emphasise what a very good film-maker he
is when encouraged by good writers such as Barry Hines
(Kes) or Bill Jesse (Riff-Raff).
He is a director admired,
and often loved, all over the world. I remember once
presiding over the International Critics' Jury at Cannes
and, as the British representative, gingerly suggesting
that one of Loach's films should at least be on the shortlist. "What?" said
several members of the jury in unison. "On the shortlist?
He's got to win!" One of them, a Latin American, added, "Who
else can make you laugh and then cry in the space of
two minutes?"
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
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