Month: October 2019

A Day Off (Hyuil)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Shot in stark black and white, this opens with a voice-over which immediately makes you think you’re watching a film noir. However, A Day Off is something else entirely – there are no cops or gangsters in sight, the narrative concerning instead a couple of doomed lovers and the opening voice-over bemoaning the hero’s meeting with his lover Ji-Yeon every Sunday. That said, it is all about poor people struggling to survive on Seoul’s mean streets and the main character is constantly cheating his fellow citizens or stealing money from them, so its subject matter is not entirely noir unrelated.

Heo-uk (Shin Seong-il, a huge star who also has a bit part in the earlier Bloodline a.k.a. Kinship, Kim Soo-yong, 1963) asks a consults a bird fortune-teller as to what the day will bring: her trained bird picks out a card warning him to Stay Away From Women. To get to his rendezvous with Ji-Yeon (Jeon Ji-youn) with scarcely any cash, he pulls a double con on a cab driver and a stall selling cigarettes to avoid paying his fare. Later, in dire need of money to pay a debt, he tries to wheedle it out of a drinking buddy. Later still, Heo-uk drops in on old school friend Gye-je so bored that he’s already had six baths that day and robs him of both the cash in his jacket pocket and the watch lying atop it before scarpering. This act will come back to bite him at the end when Gye-je catches up with him towards the narrative’s end and beats him up.

The main event, though, is the romance. Heo-uk meets Ji-Yeon in an alleyway and takes her to a deserted public park. It’s winter and there are no leaves on the trees. She talks about all the things they could have if only they weren’t so poor. They both berate themselves, He slaps her. It turns out she’s pregnant and needs the money to have what she coyly terms “an operation”. After robbing Gye-je, Heo-uk takes Ji-Yeon to the abortion clinic where the doctor warns him she wouldn’t be able to have the baby for health reasons and recommends an abortion. Once the operation is under way, Heo-uk goes to an up-market bar to get drunk and pick up the first woman he lays eyes on, the pair binge drinking their way through several bars before spending the night together on a building site.

Despite the weepy, romantic music when the couple are in the park together, this plays out as a brutal and hard hitting slice of life. Director Lee has an extraordinary eye and there’s always something going on visually – when the couple walk along the edge of the park, for example, the horizontals and verticals of the fencing preventing people from falling several feet into a ditch speak of inhuman, industrial production and an environment where people feel almost an afterthought. And towards the end, scenes of the hero walking in darkness are contrasted with visually far brighter images of him alone with his girlfriend in happier times.

The film is both utterly compelling and a real downer, showing as it does the human condition at its very worst and most meaningless. The South Korean authorities were not pleased: they demanded changes. When director Lee refused to make any, they refused the film a release. Now widely considered his masterpiece, it remained undiscovered until the Korean Film Archive unearthed it in 2005. When you see it, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard of this film before. Absolutely unmissable.

A Day Off plays Regent Street Cinema, 02 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF).

Wednesday, November 2nd, 14.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 15.30, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the festival trailer below:

Earthquake Bird

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tokyo, 1989. An American woman who’s not long been in Japan has disappeared and the last person to see her alive is Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) who has lived in the country for five years, two months. Lucy is hauled in for questioning by the police and as her life in Japan slowly reveals itself in flashback, it becomes apparent why they want to talk to her.

Lucy is quiet, reserved, introverted. She mostly keeps herself to herself. She fits in well in Japanese society with its emphasis on the importance of the group over the individual. She is fluent in Japanese and works as a translator. She plays cello in an amateur string quartet with three much older Japanese women.

She also socialises with a group of international expats which is where Bob (Jack Huston) introduces her to the woman about whom the police wish to question her, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough) who is working as a nurse. The two women possess very different personalities. Lucy might be foolish to agree to take the newly arrived foreigner under her wing and show her the ropes. Lily is the stereotypical American: brash, outgoing and nosy. Not someone you imagine adapting well to Japanese society. She doesn’t even speak the language.

Lucy’s life changes when she runs into a man taking photographs on the street. He claims not to be interested in photographing people, only buildings, water, reflections. Something hooks her. Teiji Matsuda (Naoki Kobayashi) works at a noodle restaurant, but amateur photography is his passion. Soon she’s regularly going back to his flat, strangely situated at the top of an exterior spiral staircase and fully equipped as a darkroom, to be photographed. When on one occasion she removes her top, he tells her that wasn’t what he wanted. Before long, however, the pair have entered into a full-on, physical relationship.

She becomes obsessed with the photographs of old girlfriends Teiji keeps locked away in a filing cabinet. She knows where the key is and takes a look. When he later finds out, he is not pleased. Lily, meanwhile, wants to meet the boyfriend and when she does is clearly attracted to Teiji. This classic love triangle setup is fuelled by the growing tension between Lucy and Teiji.

Much as it would like to play like a Japanese thriller, Earthquake Bird is the adaptation of an English novel and it doesn’t feel very Japanese – despite a great quantity of Japanese dialogue, much of it delivered by Vikander. (To her credit, for this film she had to learn both the Japanese language and playing the cello, the latter something she’d learned a little as a child.) That said, as an outsider’s view of Japan, it’s convincing enough. And it has to have something of a grasp of Japanese culture and the country’s mindset to work.

When the police initially question Lucy, they do so in second-rate English until they discover she’s fluent in Japanese, something she doesn’t initially reveal. This seems to be typical of the woman. She is beset by guilt for an incident in her pre-Japan past for which she rightly or wrongly believes herself responsible.

For those wondering about the title, it relates to a bird that, as Teiji explains to Lucy, if you listen carefully, can be quietly heard to sing following an earthquake. There are several small-scale literal earthquakes in the narrative, that are soon over without any ill after effects. And then there are minor earthquake-comparable incidents, like a violinist from the string quartet slipping down steps to her death, to the shame of her fellow player who has recently polished the stairs and fears she may be responsible for the accident. Or Lucy falling ill when she, Teiji and Lily go on a day trip to Sado Island.

The whole is visually arresting throughout, with top-notch cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon who shot Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and production design by Yohei Tanada who also did ManHunt (John Woo, 2017) and The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2017), so while you could wait a couple of weeks for it to turn up on Netflix, you might enjoy it more if you see it on the big screen first. As you might expect from Wash Westmoreland, previously the co-writer-director behind Still Alice (2014) and Colette (2018), this is as much character and culture study as it is thriller, which may infuriate some but reward those with the patience to take it on its own terms.

Earthquake Bird is out in the UK on Friday, November 1st. On Netflix in March!

The Pool

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) wakes up. There’s a lot of blood. He’s at the bottom of a drained, six metres deep swimming pool with a crocodile advancing towards him. But how did he – and for that matter the crocodile – get there?

Flash back to six days earlier. Day and his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) are working on a movie set. He looks after the swimming pool and as a bonus his dog Lucky has to heroically jump from the poolside over the water in the schedule’s very last shot. The dog leaps, the crew gets the shot, it’s a wrap, everyone’s happy. In fact, Day is so happy that when almost everyone else has gone, he dozes off on a lilo in the pool while its draining. When he wakes, the water level has gone down so far that he can’t get out. Somewhere on the ground nearby, a flier announces an escaped crocodile is on the loose.

Around this seemingly flimsy opening, going one day at a time up to seven days, director Lumpraploeng constructs an edge of the seat slice of narrative suspense which deserves a place in that pantheon of suspense thrillers which take place in small locations often with reduced numbers of characters. This pantheon includes:

Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, in a lifeboat);
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, in one apartment);
Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971, in a car pursued by a lorry);
Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989, three people on two boats);
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997, in, um, a cube);
Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002, in a phone booth);
Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010, in a coffin);
Frozen, 2010, Adam Green, a ski lift);
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012, in a stretch limo);
Locke (Steven Knight, 2013, in a car); and
Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018, in the Arctic following a plane crash).

None of those are what you might describe as creature features though, unless you include the brief sequence where a snake enters the coffin in Buried, the wolves on the ground below in Frozen or the bear in Arctic. But the crocodile in The Pool turns it into a full blown creature feature as well.

The trapped man in the pool’s obvious means of escape would be his girlfriend turning up and lowering a lifeline or ladder. She does indeed turn up, but then owing to a rapid-fire series of events, she quickly ends up injured, perhaps fatally, in the pool with him. Other possible ways out include a helicopter overhead, a drone, the latter’s owners descending into the pool to retrieve it and the lowering of a bamboo ladder at the poolside. There’s also a manhole cover in the middle of the pool, screwed down until our hero finds a way to remove the screws, leading to a small underground cylindrical service tunnel (shades of both Dr. No, Terence Young, 1963 and Alien, Riley Scott, 1979, the latter indubitably a creature feature, the former not so because the script cut out the giant squid Bond battles in the book) which might or might not provide a way out.

Then there’s the crocodile which following a run in with Lucky (in which we won’t tell you if the dog lives up to his name) the crocodile ends up on the floor of the swimming pool. And the fact that the hero is diabetic and his insulin shot is sitting ready in a syringe on a table beside the pool, beyond his reach.

The crocodile must be mostly CGI because otherwise at least two cast members (three if you include the dog) would have been unlikely to survive the shoot. This educated guess is based on the plethora of animation and computer technicians on the end credits, not on the croc itself which is pretty convincing on every level. The two main actors put everything they have into their performances too and the director brilliantly rachets up the tension throughout so that, as the piece proceeds to its conclusion, you’re thoroughly gripped.

While it’s hard to locate this film in specific Thai or wider East Asian culture, it shares a certain kinship with Thai action star Tony Jaa vehicle Ong Bak 2 The Beginning (Tony Jaa, 2008) which has a heart-stopping sequence with the hero fighting for his life in a flooded crocodile pit. The Pool is every bit as heart-stopping from start to finish. If no enterprising UK distributor has yet picked this up, then one of them really ought to do so.

The Pool showed at the The London East Asia Film Festival, in 2019, when this piece was originally written. On Shudder in July 2020.

Land Without God

Posted on by victorfraga

The camera opens on a middle-aged lady, seated by a derelict wooden table, eyes floorward positioned, mouth tightly closed. Probed and persuaded by a offshoot voice, the interviewee speaks on the silent promise that she owes it to the members who will not speak. Cutting to the streets of Dublin, Gerard Mannix Flynn walks the ever-changing streets of Dublin, steering his viewers into a searing portrait of a bygone Ireland.

Ireland is central to this documentary, journeyed as it is in the hills of Galway, mindful as it presents the aged towns in Offaly. The film presides over its narrative in a naturalistic way, but it is the people that make this story so pressingly important. The Flynn family offer their generational perspectives over the decades of institutional abuse that left them scarred. Anne , sister to the narrator, compares their childhood abandonment to cancer, the inner effects of a faceless disease eating its way through the body.

Land Without God does proffer some moments of devastating pathos. Returning to St. Conleths Reform School, Mannix finds a bird sitting on the splintered debris. Tellingly, the bird flies off just as he recalls the bruisings, beatings and moments of sexual abuse he encountered as a child. Clawing his ageing hands over the tumbled walls, Mannix remembers the times he prayed to a God that mocked him as the starry-eyed bird flies unknowingly into the misty skies.

Guilt hangs over the school just as guilt hangs in the interviewees. Margaret, one of the younger family members, speaks with rancorous disgust of the the Catholic Church and the way it treated its youthful fashioners. The film’s audience is primarily an Irish one, one born before the eighties at that, yet the humanity is universal, as the ragged aftermath is keenly heard from participant to participant.

This documentary, however, is not without flaws. Some frames are amateurish in display, some musical cues intrusive in their entrance and occasionally the voice-over adds little to the proceedings. The import of the film isn’t in its execution, but in its existence, ensuring that one of the more shameful phases of recent Irish history is remembered.

Land Without God is in Irish cinemas right now. A UK release has not been announced yet.

Exit

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Yong-nam (Jo Jung-suk) can’t seem to find gainful employment. A text message tells him another job application has been turned down. He spends his days at the local playground, working out on the climbing frame watched from a bench by old ladies. Passing by with schoolmates, his prepubescent nephew Ji-Ho (Kim Kang-hoon) does his best to shrug off the embarrassment he feels if he goes anywhere near his uncle. But Yong-nam scarcely notices: he’d much rather wallow in self-pity about Eui-ju (Im Yoon-ah), the girl he fancied from the rock climbing club who was not only a better climber but also dumped him. His grown up sister Jung-Hyun (Kim Ji-yeong) constantly berates him both for his failure and for his keeping lots of climbing gear in his bedroom cupboard.

So when his family gathers to celebrate his granny’s 70th birthday, Yong-nam suggests the skyscraper hotel where Eui-ju is rumoured to work. Sure enough, while he’s doing his best to sit at his table and not get roped into singing with everybody else, she appears. As he tries to impress her, inventing stories about how well his corporate career is going, you can feel the impending romantic disaster. She, meanwhile, may look successful in her job as hotel vice-manager, but her slimy manager in who she has no personal interest is constantly trying to date her and can barely do his job (holding the position simply because his dad owns the hotel).

Then the film switches gear as a disillusioned industrialist releases a deadly gas from a lorry in the centre of Seoul, not far from the hotel, which burns up the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with it. Cue drivers clutching at their necks and fatally crashing cars and pedestrians fleeing before the advancing wall of toxic gas. Cue also Jung-Hyun with Ji-Ho in tow, having briefly nipped out of the hotel, suddenly facing the approaching gas. While the child gets himself safely back to the lobby, the mother is overcome and suffers facial burns and unconsciousness before the quick-thinking Yong-nam rushes down from the floor where their party is taking place and carries her back to the sealed safety of the building.

With the gas cloud both spreading and slowly rising, the guests go up to the top floor to access the roof in the hope of being rescued by helicopter, but the door is locked and the incompetent manager has lost the key. Back on the party floor, Yong-nam improvises with rope, breaks a full storey glass window and goes climbing up the side of the building to access the roof, forced to unhook his safety line en route because his rope isn’t long enough.

When a ‘copter eventually reaches them with a rescue cage, there is room for everyone but himself and Eui-ju, who as manager commendably wants everyone else airlifted first. Remaining behind, the pair must negotiate a harrowing series of building to building jumps, Parkour and side of building climbs as they ascend higher and higher on the Seoul skyline in the hope that a ‘copter will reach them before the rising gas does.

It’s no surprise that this obvious audience pleaser has been a huge box office success in its native South Korea, juggling as it does deftly observed family comedy with nicely underplayed romantic subplot and genuinely gripping climbing, jumping, running and other action scenes. If the chemistry between the two leads accounts for some of this success, that wouldn’t matter without all the thought that director Lee has clearly put into his script to make an essentially simple idea work very well indeed. The feeling for family culture which grounds the film for its first reel pays dividends in terms of audience sympathy for the lead character and the film throws in not only some clever ideas involving drones but even at one point the extraordinary visual distraction of a giant model of a spider crab half way up a building over which our leading man and lady must climb.

The film highlighted the problem of locked roof access in buildings and the ensuing controversy has thrown up a government reaction that will hopefully in due course result in changes to South Korean law. On a wider note, it says much about a society which values people in terms of their job while marginalising any other talents or interests they may possess. When the chips are down, the hero who saves the day here is a social outcast whose frowned upon hobby is exactly what’s needed to survive the unexpectedly perilous situation in which he finds himself.

This is light, frothy entertainment and a thoroughly engrossing experience, well worth seeking out if you get the chance. LEAFF are to be congratulated for choosing it as their opening film.

Exit plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Sons of Denmark (Danmarks Sønner)

Posted on by victorfraga

Shakespeare famously proclaims in Hamlet: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”. In Sons of Denmark something is indeed very rotten in the Scandinavian country. Forget nice social democrat Denmark, the land of hygge, Danish pastries and the Little Mermaid. This is a country where migrants live in fear of vicious, xenophobic gangs, where pigs’ heads are deposited where Muslims gather, and random acid attacks are made on innocent foreigners. This film is an impressive debut by its director and writer Ulaa Salim. Made by the migrant community in Denmark, mainly Syrian and Iraqi, and their sympathisers, it portrays a country of cruel disdain for those who seem just a bit different.

Consider this. Hitler took power in Germany under laws and agreements that were, in the terms of the Weimar Constitution, entirely legal. True, there was a lot of thuggery accompanying his accession to power but he was formerly invited to be Chancellor by President Hindenburg in a acceptable normal manner. The community that Hitler vilified as dangerous Marxists, greedy capitalists and sexual perverts were one of the most integrated in Europe. The list of Jewish contributors to German thought and culture is embarrassingly long. The Sons of Denmark are a collection of thugs led by the obnoxious Martin Nordahl (Rasmus Bjerg), who claims to have nothing to do with the nasty behaviour of the fascist right wing group. In fact, he helps to organise it and even participates in it (albeit wearing a mask). The Sons of Denmark eventually win a general election in Denmark.

Ulaa Salim, the writer and director of this hard-hitting film, takes the above political logic and shows how it might come true in Denmark. The migrants depicted in the film are ordinary people mainly from Syria or Iraq, who have often endured terrible suffering and lost members of their families in getting to Denmark. Some are so poor, they live in cellars, their families only partitioned off from other families by curtains. They are trying desperately to rebuild their lives and earn a living. True, they are different, being Muslim and having different habits, and some of them are Islamists (an explosion let off by such opens the film) but the vast majority are entirely decent and moderate people. Ali (Zaki Youssef), one of the leaders of the community, describes the Islamists as “morons”.

Despite all this, they are harassed, attacked and described as “terrorists”, “rapists” and “thieves”. Remember Nigel Farage’s migrants poster just before the Brexit referendum? Nothing in this film depicts anything that is impossible. A group of young migrant men under the direction of Ali try to fight back against the attacks. Even if you try to co-operate with the authorities as Hassan does (Imad Abul-Foul), this does not stop your family from being viciously assaulted in your own home.

Against all this is the sometimes sincere but generally lacklustre support of the Danish police against the Sons of Denmark. You feel that actually their sympathies lie with Martin Nordahl – not the migrant community. Again one is reminded of the enthusiastic support of the German police in helping the Nazis round up leftist opponents when Hitler took power.

This superb Danish movie operates like a police thriller mixed with politics, and it raises many urgent questions. Those who like Scandi-noir will enjoy the twists and turns of the plot, accompanied effectively by the score of Mozart’s Requiem.

Sons of Denmark is in cinemas on Friday, December 13th. You may also watch it from home for free with ArteKino during the entire month of December – just click here for more information.

Dolemite is my Name

Posted on by victorfraga

Rudy Ray Moore was a stand-up comedian, R&B singer and eventually movie star and film producer. He was also the star of blaxploitation classic Dolemite (D’Urville Martin, 1975). The titular character was the alter-ego he would adopt first on his comedy album Eat Out More Often. Due to the wild success of that album in the Black community and the smash success of other Blaxploitation films, he decided he should attempt to make a film based on his Dolemite character. Dolemite was a pimp who had “mastered” the art of kung fu.

Eddie Murphy portrays Rudy Ray Moore in a career-best performance. Murphy hasn’t been this good since Bowfinger (Frank Oz, 1999), another film about the quirks of low-budget filmmaking. Craig Brewer is credited as the director, and directs here with flare, but this is a perfect example of writer – or writers, in this case – as auteur. The screenwriting partnership of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski has carved out a niche over the years since Ed Wood of making biopics about offbeat true stories, often with a showbiz twist , such as Andy Kaufman, Margaret Keane, Larry Flynt and the trial of O.J. Simpson. The elevator pitch here being “The Black Ed Wood“, and that’s a fair assessment, right up to an ending that recalls the final moments of Ed Wood. Eddie Murphy even sought out the screenwriting team, because he saw the clear parallels.

Murphy may be at the height of his powers here, but if anything, he gets upstaged by Wesley Snipes as D’Urville Martin who, like Murphy, has had a few rough years, including some prison time. Snipes is clearly having a ball portraying this hammy actor who took himself way too seriously, with a whiff of Camp for good measure. Martin would actually end up directing Dolemite in order to sweeten the offer of co-staring in the film. He would direct Disco 9000 a few years later, before he died young at only 45.

From the opening to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On through to the film’s final moments, it’s a just a joyful cinematic experience. The only huge issue with the film you could have is that Rudy Ray Moore was most likely gay, and although it’s hinted at in the film including a scene where he is noticeably uncomfortable filming a sex scene, no girlfriend to speak of, his friendship with the black and very openly gay producer Theodore Toney played by Tituss Burgess. I would presume a draft of the screenplay dealt with Rudy’s sexuality more explicitly, and although it’s not necessarily needed for the story that Murphy, Brewer, Alexander and Karaszewski are telling, it would’ve added a extra dimension to the portrayal of Rudy. The character of Dolemite is so over-the-top that he’s almost like a drag queen Superfly, so given the fact he was gay it would make Dolemite’s hyper-heterosexuality even that more hilarious.

The rest of the supporting cast is exceptional from Keegan-Michael Key as Jerry Jones, who would end up being the screenwriter of Dolemite and Rudy’s right-hand man during the production, to Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nicholas Josef von Sternberg (yes, the son of the noted director of the same name) who got his start as the cinematographer on Dolemite. Chris Rock has a fun cameo as a DJ, but one of the other big standouts is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who gives it all as Lady Reed. Reed was one of the main female co-stars of many of Rudy Ray Moore’s films. She gives a lot of depth and heart to what could have been a thankless role.

This is one of the best films of the year, but perhaps just as importantly, and also one of the most entertaining. I just had a smile on my face during the film’s entire 118 running time. Everything from the script to the exceptional cast to the truly jaw-dropping costume work from Ruth E Carter and the needle-drops on the soundtrack were top-notch.

Dolemite is my Name is on Netflix on Friday, October 25th. It’s also showing in selected cinemas.

Tales from the Lodge

Posted on by victorfraga

In a quaint and remote lodge somewhere in the idyllic English countryside, a small group of friends meets up in order to scatter the ashes of their friend Jonesy, who tragically drowned in the local lake a few years earlier. Some of these people are facing some sort of painful predicament: Martha’s husband is terminally ill, while Emma is struggling with motherhood, and so on. The jaunty Paul, on the other hand, is in high spirits and wishes to party. He and his girlfriend Miki stir up the already existing tensions. Then a mysterious murderer appears. This is more or less how the story goes. Not that it makes much sense. I couldn’t make head or tail of the story. In fact, I had to read the press notes in order to write this introductory paragraph.

Tales from the Lodge is genuinely one of the most disjointed and unintentionally ridiculous films that I have seen in a long time. And I watch a lot of films. It works neither as a black comedy nor as a horror movie. There are no jump scares. The humour is tedious and trite. The jokes are hardly witty: ““It’s so peaceful in here that the kids would love it: there are no cars and no paedophiles”. The ashes of Jonesy fly on the eyes and mouth of one of the mourning friends as the wind blows the content of the urn. A fat character who looks like “Kiefer Sutherland” appears in a bizarre cutaway gag. The sex scene is cringeworthy. The zombie make-up and the special effects are awful. The plot twist at the end conjures up the three inevitable letters:” WTF?”. This is not slapstick. This is not wilfully preposterous. This is a combination of atrocious script writing, shambolic camerawork and clumsy acting.

The only frightening thing about Tales from the Lodge is that it could get a theatrical release. That is the real joke. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 1st. Scream and run away from it as fast as you can!

Ken Loach’s lucid indictment on free market capitalism

Posted on by victorfraga

Ken Loach remains the most prominent and virtually unchallenged voice of the working class in British cinema. His latest movie Sorry We Missed You is an extremely powerful statement about eroding working conditions in modern-day Britain. Our editor Victor Fraga believes that it is even more excruciatingly painful to watch (and therefore even more effective) than its companion piece from three years ago I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. That’s because audiences are forced to walk in the shoes of the oppressed working man.

In Sorry We Missed You, Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a building worker with an impeccable CV, living with his family somewhere in suburban Newcastle. He persuades his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) to sell off her car so that he can buy a van and move into the delivery industry. A franchise owner promises Ricky that he’ll be independent and “own his own business”, and earn up to £1,200 a week. The reality couldn’t be more different. Ricky ends up working up to 14 hours a day six days a week. His draconian delivery targets turn him into a delivery robot. Ricky has been conned. His “independence” is but an illusion. Click here in order to read the review of the movie.

Our editor sat down with Ken in order to understand the challenges that Ricky and the working class in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world face, and what we can do in order to overcome their apparently insurmountable barriers. They also discussed modern-day slavery, Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, free movement and how British movies have helped the far-right to disseminate prejudices and fake patriotism!

Sorry We Missed You is in cinemas on Friday, November 1st!

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Victor Fraga – Four million working people are currently living in poverty in the UK. That’s four million Rickies and Abbies? How have we failed so many people?

Ken Loach – That’s actually 14 million. One-four [in reality, this is the total number of people living in poverty, not just workers living in poverty]. Four million of those are children. And 1.5 million are in dire poverty. That means that they don’t have the means to the essentials of life.

It’s a process that began with Margaret Thatcher. She destroyed communities in the old working-class areas, with mines and factories being closed. Those were the old days of the secure job, with the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week, a wage on which you could bring up a family and have somewhere to live, have a holiday without losing money. Those working conditions were gradually eroded under the pressures of harsh competition from big companies, because they have to compete on both quality and price, so those who get the trade will be cheaper. They have to cut their labour costs. And they do that by finding new ways to employ people. They don’t pay holiday pay, they don’t pay sick pay. They have no responsibility for the worker beyond their day’s work. They can hire and fire them very easily. So they work through agencies, which also have no responsibility for the worker. They are so called self-employed. The bogus self-employment.

The work in this case, he [Ricky from Sorry We Missed You] is simply providing a service. He’s just a worker providing a service. Therefore they don’t need to obey trade unions rules, they don’t need to pay the minimum wage. It’s just a contract to supply a service. That of course isn’t true, because the driver is entirely contracted to this one company, and they are to all effects and purposes one worker. But this new form of words for the same job means the employer has no responsibility.

VF – Who changed the words?

KL – Employers found clever new strategies. They are market-orientated people who find their way around the rules. The minimum wage doesn’t apply to someone who’s providing a service. So a driver might work 12 hours a day or more and still struggle to make a decent living. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage and the guaranteed working week have been swept away by the gig economy.

It’s a logic. If you are committed to the free market, that’s based on competition. Firms compete on price, therefore they must continue that exploitation, otherwise they are going to lose trade.

VF – We’re seeing far-right and ultra neo-liberal governments destroy working rights around the world. I’m from Brazil, where the phenomenon is more pronounced yet not entirely dissimilar to the UK. Is the erosion of working rights the natural and inevitable consequence of capitalism, or is this just a perverse subversion of capitalism?

KL – I think it’s an inevitable consequence of free market capitalism. Because, as I say, it’s based on competition and therefore they will try to cut their labour costs and increase exploitation. That’s the only way they can do it. And now they use technology in order to do it. So Ricky as a driver, he doesn’t have someone over him telling him he has to work harder. He’s got a machine in the car which knows where he is every two minutes. It beeps if he’s out of the car for more than two minutes. It allows him no time to go to the lavatory. No time for a break. He’s driven by a piece of electronic equipment. He’s forced to exploit himself. And when the worker has to exploit himself, that’s the ideal situation for the employer.

VF – I would argue that we saw improvements in working conditions in the 20th century. And we’re now going back to Victorian times, or even the industrial revolution. Do you agree?

KL – Absolutely. I think that there was a real change in consciousness after WW2, the public good was something that we all subscribed to. Trade unions grew stronger, and therefore workers’ rights grew stronger. The trade unions had the negotiating strength to get the eight-hour day, to get a decent wage. Collective bargaining is the strength of the working class. And that’s what Thatcher aimed to destroy. And to a large extent she succeeded. Partly because the labour movement itself, and the Labour Party, didn’t put up a good enough fight.

What’s much remarkable about this time right now is that with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, it’s the first time in 100-year history that the Labour Party has a leader of the left. And that leadership will stand for the interests of the working class. Blair stood with business. Corbyn will stand with workers, and that’s why he’s so attacked.

VF – The working conditions in Sorry We Missed You are comparable to slavery. The British Empire was built upon slavery. Have we found a surrogate for old-fashioned colonialism whereby we oppress our very own workforce?

KL – I wouldn’t use the work slavery. It’s too glib. Colonialism has been replaced by the working class of countries were the wages are even lower than they are here. Getting clothes from Bangladesh is a form of colonialism, because we are using their very exploited working class for goods to sell here. When capitalism goes global, the trade goes to those on starvation wages. It’s a race to the bottom. And we know that the working conditions in some Eastern countries are atrocious.

VF – Abbie knows unfettered solidarity and devotion to her job. But she pays a price for that. Has solidarity become unfeasible or even illegal?

KL – They have tried to nullify it, and that’s a challenge for the left. Solidarity needs political intervention. And obviously we need strong trade unions. But in order to get strong trade unions we need a party in power that will restore their powers, which Thatcher took away. A party that will make zero-hour contracts illegal. There has to be some commitment to the working week. Otherwise the minimum wage is meaningless. There also has to be an end to bogus self-employment. And there’s yet another change that we must deliver. Not long ago our post office was nationalised. And was always a public service. We owned it. Then the Tories privatised it, and now we need to bring it back into public ownership, so that parcels are delivered by the postman. That cuts out this need to rip-off delivery companies.

The system pits people against each other. The fastest driver gets the best route, which means they will earn more money. They consciously put one driver against another. That’s what Paul Laverty’s [Loach’s screenwriter for nearly three decades] found in his research. And that’s another reason why this bogus self-employment should end.

VF – Will Ricky be better off in post-Brexit Britain? Will he enjoy more or will he enjoy less labour protections?

KL – This bogus self-employment is happening while we are in the European Union, and it will get worse if Boris Johnson and the Tories are in power when we leave. Brexit is a distraction. Because the big issues – poverty, exploitation and failing public services – are being neglected. For the left, it’s a tactical question.

VF – Let’s say Jeremy Corbyn gets to power. Do you think Ricky will be better off -in a post-Brexit Jeremy Corbyn government?

KL – That depends on the deal. They haven’t negotiated the deal yet. I would hope that a Labour government under Corbyn would negotiate a deal whereby we have control over our fisheries, so that we can protect the fish stock, and we have control over agriculture, so we can control the ecological side. And we would improve on workers’ rights by ending zero-hour contracts and bogus self-employment. We would bring public services entirely back into public ownership. Not outsourced. That might be against EU policies of competitive industry, their rules of what the state can do in terms of intervention. They think that’s against competition.

VF – But aren’t some public services nationalised in the largest EU countries, such as the trains in France and Germany?

KL – Yes, they are, but that’s a tension within the European Union. The European Union’s founding document is based on the free market. So those examples are an anomaly in the practice and in the rules. If you look at the rules, they oppose state intervention if it interferes with competition. I would argue that a Labour government needs to intervene in competition in order to provide a better service and protect workers’ rights. It depends on the deal that Corbyn gets, if he gets elected. If the deal is a good deal Ricky would be better off outside the EU. If the Corbyn deal is not a good deal, he’d be better off inside the EU. It’s a judgement you can only make once you see the deal Labour has negotiated.

VF – What about free movement and diversity? If we close our borders and no EU people can come in, would that have a positive impact on Ricky’s life?

KL – In principle, you have to be in favour of free movement. But I think that in order for free movement to be really free – not a means of an employer getting cheap labour – the economies have to be roughly equal. Because if the wages are lower in one group of countries, people will migrate to where the wages are higher. And that’s what happened. And that can produce problems of racism, because the local people feel undermined in their income. In order to avoid that, there should be a conscious move to equalise the economies. People can travel, freely, but they can have a good living in their own country. Free movement has to go alongside equalising the economies.

VF – But that’s going to take a long time. Wages in Romania won’t be on the same level as Britain in 10 or 20 years. Does that mean we should close our gates for now?

KL – No, I think that we need to work with poorer countries so that their young talent don’t go abroad to work in coffee shops because the wages are higher. But equally, that’s got to be done with planning and agreement, not with one country putting up barriers.

VF – Fake patriotism and nostalgia of imperialism are more rabid than ever, with the ultra-nationalistic Brexit Party coming first in the latest EU elections. How can cinema help to fend off this dangerous and reactionary threat?

KL – Yes, I agree with you that there’s a lot of fake patriotism, xenophobia, chauvinism. I think that cinema and the left in general should communicate that people are of equal value, whatever their origin, religion, the language they speak. Everyone is our neighbour. Our working class people have more in common with the working class of other European countries than with our ruling class. We’ve taken Sorry We Missed You to Spain, France, Germany and Ireland so far, and everywhere it’s the same story. When you show it to an audience in France you realise that delivery drivers here have exactly the same situation as delivery drivers in the rest of Europe, and they have nothing in common with Boris Johnson’s ruling class.

VF – I think that a lot of mainstream cinema has helped to stir fake patriotism and anti-European resentment, and some films are Brexit’s BFF, such as Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) and Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2018). They are a manna from heaven for people like Farage. Do you share my view?

KL – Very much so. We had so many war films after the War where all the Germans were bad, except there was one nice German. That’s where the phrase “the good German” passed into common usage. The message of these films was: “Germans are bad”. The German language became associated with Nazis, even though the British governments were happy to support the fascists in Spain under Franco. Churchill was a rabid imperialist. We supported dictators and the far-right around the world. Same with the States. So came the phrase: “he might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”. So let’s not take any lessons from the far-right and their patriotism, because the interests of the working people are the same anywhere in the world.

VF – Does mainstream cinema tend to have a subliminal far-right message?

KL – Yes, absolutely. The classic message of the American cinema is: “one man with a gun will sort your problems”. It’s not about solidarity.

VF – What about British cinema?

KL – I don’t know much about British cinema, to be honest. It may seem strange.

VF – It does seem very strange!!!

KL – That’s true. The British war films that I grew up with were always about the “good Brit” versus the “bad German”. Or the coward Italian. They were all stereotypes.

VF – You made a documentary entitled In Conversation with Jeremy Corbyn (2016), yet there doesn’t seem to be much positive coverage of the Labour leader elsewhere. Do you believe that the British media – even the left-leaning papers such as The Guardian – are biased against Jeremy Corbyn, is there a smear campaign, and has that impacted how your documentary was received?

KL – It was a just short film, it never really had a major presence, so I wouldn’t say I encountered resistance.

I spoke to Jeremy very little about this. So this is just my opinion. The right wing and the centre press – the Guardian included (which I don’t see it as a left wing newspaper) the BBC, ITV and so on – certainly have to varying degrees opposed Corbyn. The only paper that supports him is The Morning Star, but the others won’t even acknowledge its existence. There is a smear campaign against him, there is a campaign to undermine and to ridicule him. And key to that are the Labour MPs, the majority of which came to power when Blair was the leader, so they are right wing Labour MPs and their task is to undermine Corbyn. They are the biggest danger we face.

The picture at the top and at the bottom and of this article are of Ken Loach and Victor Fraga on the the day this interview was conducted. The other images are stills from Ken Loach’s latest film Sorry We Missed You.

Bringing Out the Dead

Posted on by victorfraga

It seems that no director/writer duo, regardless of their track record, is immune to having work undeservedly slip through the cracks. In the case of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, who had previously seen critical success with Raging Bull (1980) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), their forgotten gem is Bringing Out the Dead.

Based on a book of the same name by Joe Connelly and celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019, Bringing Out the Dead can be seen as an update of Scorsese and Schrader’s seminal Taxi Driver (1976) – both are set in New York and take place largely at night, for example, where the lead character drives around the city, dismayed at the depravity he sees.

The biggest difference between the two antagonists is that while Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle looked at all these people with contempt and a misguided sense of righteousness, Bringing Out the Dead’s Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) wants to help them – which is no surprise, really, given he’s a paramedic. The film follows Frank across three nights patrolling New York’s seedier streets in an ambulance, each time accompanied by a different partner (John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Seizemore), treating those in need of assistance – much of them on the city’s underground in the middle of an epidemic of a new drug called the Red Death.

We get an insight into Frank’s mindset and an idea of what the many years on the job have done to his psyche. Everywhere he goes, his mind flashes back to the people he knows have died there, in particular one particular patient, a young woman who he could not resuscitate on the street. Seeing death in all corners of the city clearly have taken a toll on Frank. Another similarity is that they both find themselves drawn to a woman; for Travis it was Betsy and in Frank’s case it’s Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of a heart attack patient he treats. However, whereas Travis saw Betsy as being his salvation, Mary affords Frank something less needful but just as important – comfort and respite from the bleakness of his life.

Though open to comparisons, Bringing Out the Dead is far more than just Taxi Driver revised. In might seem like a bit of a departure or diversion for Scorsese, but in many ways it’s a model of his entire body of work. Everything you would expect from a Scorsese film is all there – the New York backdrop, the conflicted man at a turning point in his life, characters who feel the system is against them. It’s a film that shows that he is unfazed as a filmmaker and willing to tackle any subject, and does so with his usual enthusiasm and energy.

Scorsese and Schrader don’t put Frank on a conventional journey to redemption or salvation, instead providing a snapshot look at his life. Also, Frank is not a Christ-like character acting on behalf of a higher power, he is far more realistic and relatable than that, and the absence of a more traditional narrative makes Bringing Out the Dead more intriguing and compelling.

Bringing Out the Dead is not all doom and gloom, though – on another level it works just as well as a dark comedy. Frank’s fellow medical professionals, so jaded by the job, indulge in plenty of inappropriate conversations throughout the film. Rhames has the best moment, gathering together members of a punk band to pray for the revival of one of their own, who goes by the name I.B. Bangin.

The film opened in October 1999 to favourable reviews, but was unable to find an audience and made a big loss at the box office. Maybe the faint praise didn’t do it any favours, maybe the masses found it indefinite. Another possible explanation is that David Fincher’s Fight Club was released the week before and was still taking cinemas by storm. Whatever happened, there’s no real reason why Bringing Out the Dead should not have done better, especially given its pedigree.

Even so, Bringing Out The Dead is not a film that falls back on its laurels or its own mythology, it is made with conviction and everyone involved – Scorsese, Schrader, Cage, cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Thelma Schoonmaker to name a few – are firing on all cylinders. This is a worthy entry in the careers of all involved and definitely does not deserve to be forgotten.

This piece was written for the 20th anniversary of Bringing Out the Dead. The re-release has been scheduled, but the film is widely available on all major VoD platforms.

The House Of Us (Woori-Jip)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Eleven-year-old Lee Hana (Kim Na-yeon) watches her mum and dad argue. The family should be having breakfast, but instead mum finds ways to berate dad every time he opens his mouth. She has a brother, but doesn’t get on with him especially well. When she gets to school, Hana is as surprised as anyone else that she’s won the Good Classmate Award. Her dad is really pleased. But what she really wants is for her parents to get their relationship back on track. To this end, throughout the narrative, she keeps proposing a family trip to the seaside. But her mum is way too busy with her demanding job to spare a weekend any time soon.

One day in the supermarket, Hana observes nine-year-old Yoo-mi (Kim Shi-a) and her seven-year-old younger sister Yoo-jin (Joo Ye-rim). They seem to be happy as sisters: perhaps their family life is better than hers. A short time after, she runs into Yoo-jin again when the younger girl has lost her sister. Hana takes the girl in hand and searches with her until they find her older sister. The three become friends.

Later at home, when her dad’s phone rings, Hana discovers he has a girlfriend and reacts by hiding his phone in a shoebox, which she later takes to the other two girls home to give them things to play with. The phone gets forgotten. The three later prank phone “devil Joo” from a payphone and call her a tramp.

Meanwhile, the two girls’ mum’s landlady, who can never find their absent mum to speak to her, is trying to put the flat back on the market, which would mean the girls having to move out. Hana and the two girls play up when she brings prospective tenants to see the flat, making up stories about how terrible the flat is to live in because of all its problems (which they’ve invented).

Having helped them build a model of their ideal house out of household odds and ends, Hana organises herself and the two girls a trip to Bora beach to find their mother, but the three get a bus which doesn’t go where they expect and eventually end up at the wrong beach, taking up in the abandoned tent of a family from which the man has just rushed his pregnant wife to hospital. Both families, that of Hana and that of the two sisters, clearly have a lot of issues to work though.

With compelling performances by its three young leads, this South Korean movie completely takes you into the mindset of an eleven-year-old girl as she grapples with complex, adult issues – the breakdown of personal relationships, landlord and tenant problems. It holds the attention for an adult audience, and is likely to do the same for children of eleven or above (or at least for girls of that age). Not so much a children’s movie as a movie about children, it has plenty of rough edges for the parts of childhood where things aren’t as rosy as they might be. All of which makes it worth seeing.

The House Of Us plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below: