Poor Cow

The Evil of Banality

When, after half a dozen years of directing television series and semi-documentaries for television, Ken Loach turned to filmmaking, the filmmaker represented the hinge between Free Cinema — Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz — and the British naturalist cinema of the 1970s and 1980s — Mike Leigh, Stephen Before stating his political and philosophical commitments — Marxist and internationalist — his first non-television film, Poor Cow (1967), although it didn't achieve the success and critical acclaim of his next film — Kes (1969) — established a style and a break with the codes of narrative cinema in use at the time, before the radical oppositions that emerged after May 68, first in France and then throughout Europe. In Poor Cow we can still see the traces of the television school — the rapid montage of close-ups of faces or urban scenarios to suggest environments. Above all, the film contains a first-person voice-over narration of the various episodes of the protagonist's saga, culminating in the frontal close-up statements that are characteristic of television interviews, which serve as a finale, leaving any conclusion in suspense: the film doesn't have a happy or tragic ending. In fact, this lack of drama is the essential originality of the film. Joy, who has all the traits of a "sex symbol" and looks like Brigitte Bardot when she puts on a sullen expression, can simultaneously write a passionate love letter to Dave and go to bed with a stranger, fear or even hate Tom and agree to a temporary reconciliation with him, etc. In other words: Ken Loach stages and accentuates the contradictions of his characters, who suffer but don't change, who are incapable of making radical choices or taking their destiny into their own hands. Behind the very banal adventures of these three characters — theft, arrest, conviction, imprisonment in the case of Dave and Tom, various odd jobs and "sexual promiscuity" in the case of Joy — Ken Loach undertakes a social and critical analysis of disadvantaged backgrounds and the status of women. Tom is the perfect prototype of the macho man, unable to get up to turn up the sound on the television when his wife is around, and therefore prone to do so... They all value money above all else and don't hesitate to abandon all moral codes in order to get it. All of them are profoundly incapable of changing their behaviour, even if they are aware of the dead end to which habits and laziness lead them — prison for repeat offences — or, in retrospect, of the frugality of the ingredients needed for a moment of happiness: the kiss under the Welsh waterfall is filmed like the famous Mastroianni/Ekberg amplexus at the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita. In the end, it is restraint that characterises the style that Ken Loach introduced into the politically engaged British cinema of the 1960s: no tears, no screams, aggression received as if violence and suffering were natural, as if the characters had only to resign themselves to their condition (as poor people, as women...) in a universe where happiness, unattainable, consists only of a glass, a piece of clothing, a piece of jewellery. On a deeper level, however, the film plays with the codes that viewers have long assimilated from contemporary cinema: the characters — the actors — are photogenically and conventionally beautiful: Carol White, often compared to Julie Christie, who died of an overdose; John Bindon, whose career can't withstand his proven contacts with scum, who end up taking him to court; only Terence Stamp manages to make an international career — but in later interviews he goes so far as to say that he regrets that Ken Loach didn't delve into the psychology of the character from a disadvantaged background, which is precisely the one in which the actor grew up. It is through this discrepancy between the photogenic — generally associated with gold and wealth — and the miserable, or at least precarious, living conditions — Joy is repeatedly forced to get rid of all the objects that furnish the flat in which she is temporarily installed — that the filmmaker conveys his political message, without having to press the pathos button: the underprivileged classes are distinguished not by a physicality or a set of skills — at most by language, which Joy would like to improve in order to be able to go to other places without feeling embarrassed — but by a habitus and a "horizon of expectations". It takes an incident — Tom's total lack of interest in his son — and a moment of panic — the search for the child amidst the metaphorical rubble of a world falling apart — for a "natural" feeling, maternal love, to reappear at the end of the film and become a criterion that allows the protagonist to face the future, to confront it and to make decisions about her "destiny".