Ken Loach’s new film is the third of a series that all feature a storyline that plays out against the backdrop of crumbling care services and the isolation of individuals from society. Sorry We Missed You; I, Daniel Blake and now The Old Oak can be seen as a three-part blast at Tory Britain – the inequality, unfairness and grinding poverty that their system forces onto people.
Not propaganda at all, these dramas focus on the stories of people caught in difficult or impossible situations arising from factors they cannot control. Beyond the stories of the struggling characters lies a cruel world outside and viewers are left to ask themselves why it is so.
In The Old Oak a busload of refugees from Syria are brought to live in the empty houses of a former mining village in the North-East. With the closure of the local pit not long after the miners’ strike of 1984-5, the community has had to face up to unemployment and low wages in Micky Mouse jobs, poverty, drugs, falling house prices and the decay of the village.
The landlord of The Old Oak, a pub with one of the few spaces left where people can meet, is T J Ballantyne. But he is barely making ends meet and drinkers fire off racist remarks and other backward comments – something they would hardly have done as miners in a thriving community with a working pit.
One of the refugees, Yara, played by Ebla Mari, has her prized possession, her camera, thrown to the ground by a hostile group of locals as she gets off the bus. TJ pays for its repair and gradually the two of them develop a friendship out of mutual respect that changes them both, and eventually the whole community. She sees photos of the miners’ strike and understands what everyone in the community went through at the hands of the state, while he hears of the arrests and atrocities by the Syrian secret police.
Attitudes slowly change in the village. TJ opens the back room of the pub for the refugees plus a few of the locals to hold a social. He does this after refusing the space to his regulars. At least there is now discourse to be had in the community, that leads up to the liberating and uplifting final scenes, as a sense of togetherness takes hold.
TJ symbolises all sacked miners, of whom there were nearly 200,000 at the time of the strike, and whose communities were largely left to fend for themselves – without the pit. Despair is never far away, and he attempts suicide twice by drowning. The first time, as he is wading into the sea, he hears furious barking, and turns round to see a little dog bounding over the rocks towards him.
He climbs out and claims it as a rescue dog. They become inseparable, but tragedy strikes when it is attacked and killed by a monster dog, an event that somehow seems appropriate in the bleak rundown atmosphere of a village with no sense of purpose any more. The second time, in an echo of the first, it is Yara gesticulating as she runs down the cliff that changes his mind. Both scenes are beautifully filmed. TJ gets the opportunity to fight back, to do something.
It is the political understanding of Loach and his writer-collaborator Paul Laverty, that provides a framework from which beautiful, sometimes heart-rending but always relevant stories can emerge. Some are tragedies, some end with hope as in The Old Oak, but they all take the viewer beyond just the narrative to an inner, but often hidden, truth that people can recognise, to the political and social realities of capitalism that blight our society. The stories come out of this framework of understanding, but the skill and art of relating these stories come from the way they are filmed, with humour, warmth and humanity in the context of hard times.
Perhaps this skill of getting so close to real life is why Loach is seen as a bit of a maverick director and who is recognised so much more in Europe than in his home country, where he might be seen as subversive, or at least unwelcome, by the establishment, including now the current Labour Party leadership.
One would think that the maker of Kes, Cathy Come Home, Up the Junction and many more classic firms would be celebrated in the UK. In any event the cinemas in the North such as Sheffield showing The Old Oak have been full and it was screened at the Durham Miners’ Gala to packed houses. Recognition enough perhaps.
Loach has always shot the scenes of his films chronologically in the order in which the action plays out so that the cast can more closely identify with the story as it unravels. Many of the actors in his films are not professionals, including TJ Ballantyne, played by Dave Turner, who was a firefighter in real life, but they always give astounding performances.
Loach of course is an old socialist and a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn`s policies. In a recent interview about his new film with the BBC, he says of Kier Starmer the current leader of the Labour Party: “I`ve no hope for Starmer at all. I mean I think he`s a real political vacuum on the left because he`s moved to within a cigarette paper of the Tories. I mean the whole 2017 programme (by Corbyn) has been wiped out of public discourse.”