Papa Loach

ONE OF the very few contemporary film-makers who still works from the heart rather than the wallet, Ken Loach continues to press relentlessly onward with the most single-minded and socially-conscious body of work in modern cinema. In a career plagued throughout by censorship and controversy, the English director has continually remained true to his socialist principles, irrespective of the costs this has incurred in career terms. He may never have invented a new cinematic language in the manner of a Malick or Lynch, or brought laughter to millions the way Woody Allen did – but by any objective standards, he is surely destined to go down in history as one of the great film-makers.

Outside of the UK, where his sheer popularity has ensured generally sympathetic press coverage, Loach has been largely marginalised by the critics, and it should be instructive to see how his latest work – filmed, believe it or not, in the good old US of A – is received across the ocean. Bread & Roses is Hollywood as it’s never quite been presented before: it’s a portrait of Tinseltown’s invisible inhabitants, the ones that clean the toilets and change the bedsheets, and the picture it paints of class relations in LA is every bit as ugly as you might expect. A more overtly political – and less melodramatic – work than the director’s knockout 1998 masterpiece My Name is Joe, the result may strike some as a shade less powerful than its immediate precursor. Nonetheless, Bread & Roses is still more emotionally hard-hitting than anything mainstream cinema has served up all year, and represents compulsory viewing for established fans.

Loach puts it as simply as possible: “Bread and Roses is about what it’s like to be an immigrant. And in Hollywood, by and large, they are not represented. It’s like the world of 18th or 19th century writers before Dickens, where the workers are invisible. And there’s a particular hypocrisy in the way that immigrants are treated there – that on the one hand, they are abused for taking the jobs, spending the tax money and generally being a blot on the environment. On the other hand, they’re there to be used as cheap labour. So they are both used and abused, and to explore that particular hypocrisy was very important. It’s a side of Los Angeles that doesn’t really exist in the cinema we see, and it was a particular challenge to explore this.”

To this end, it was imperative that the LA depicted in Bread & Roses was as far removed from the usual Venice Beach/Hollywood Hills visual splendour as possible. The vast majority of the action takes place inside dull, grey, faceless buildings, a deliberate backdrop to the drudgeful lives led by the film’s characters.

“We tried to look at Los Angeles in a way that was very different to the usual mainstream films or TV, where it’s always portrayed as full of cops in fast cars and hoodlums. We wanted to wipe the mist from the window and see real people there.”

Ironically, Loach was deeply unimpressed by the mountain-load of regulations imposed by the American technical unions during the filming.

“I guess you saw the good side of trade unionism, but you also saw the worst examples of trade unionism, which is when unions become self-protecting guilds. Then again, the Americans who made the film with us were magnificent – committed, loyal and hard-working. We had the feeling that there were many good people, trying to do good work, in an environment that was very alienating. And of course, we had to be mischievous on occasion and break the rules quietly. Following their rules, or circumventing them, or coming out of a different door from the one you’re expected to is quite entertaining… like being the mischievous boy in the class again.”

The director’s general impressions of LA were mixed, but it’s apparent that he enjoyed making the film there.

“Basically I’d never worked in the United States before, and I thought I should have a go before hanging up the viewfinder. It was also in the city which is the home of motion pictures, and yet it was about a kind of parallel world, a complete other world that existed side by side with the movie world. It was about organising immigrant workers – Spanish speakers, very vulnerable, easily exploited, and yet they managed to get over it. And having worked on the film in Nicaragua (Carla’s Song), this seemed another element in the same wider story, the relationship between the US and countries that are essentially its colonies. They’re not formally colonies, but in practise, economically and culturally, that’s what they are.’

It isn’t a huge exaggeration, in this context, to point out that Loach himself is a refugee of sorts, having made his name in television with a series of powerful dramas and documentaries, before its powers-that-be tired of his abrasive hard-leftism and gradually declared him an Unperson. During the 1960s, he was responsible for several ‘social realist’ portrayals of working-class life, the most notable of which (1966’s Cathy Come Home) had such an impact at the time that it led to a public outcry, questions in Parliament, the establishment of housing charity Shelter, and a government U-turn on dissolving homeless families. Though Loach, at the time, saw this success as proof of TV drama’s ability to effect social change, he has long since reluctantly come to the conclusion that “television, and film for that matter, can do nothing more than provide a social critique, and promote awareness of these problems. But they can only be resolved through political action.”

Bread & Roses is now playing at selected

cinemas.