2023-11-25 16:35:22
When the American Oliver Anthony released his song “Rich Men North of Virginia” in August, it made the young man with the red bushy beard an overnight star. Just with the guitar, Anthony, himself a former factory worker, sings about honest hard workers who are so burdened by taxes that a dollar they earn is no longer worth “shit”. But it’s not just the rich people “north of Richmond” who are to blame, but also the obese people who let taxpayers finance their gluttony. The song quickly gained celebrity fans, including podcaster Joe Rogan, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative publicist Matt Walsh. However, some people were very bothered by the country hit, which also blames those who are very poor for the misery of the common man.
The British protest singer legend Billy Bragg, for example, felt compelled to give a musical answer: “If you have health problems and put on more and more pounds, the doctor will prescribe you opioids,” sang Bragg (65), alluding to the addiction crisis in the USA at. This is also due to the fact that for a long time many sick people were prescribed very strong and highly addictive painkillers in order to continue to function in their jobs despite illness – including billions in profits for pharmaceutical companies. Bragg asks his fellow singer-songwriter whether it wouldn’t be better “for people like you and me” if the right medicine were subsidized and concludes: “Join a Union.”
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„Rich Men North of Richmond“
From Bragg you quickly turn to his compatriot Ken Loach, who is something like the Billy Bragg of filmmakers. Of course, the now 87-year-old director belongs to an earlier generation. He was born in Warwickshire, central England, in 1936; his father had worked his way up from the mine into a factory. What Loach, who already dealt with striking miners in a BBC documentary (“Which Side Are You On? Songs, poems and experiences of the Miners’ Strike”) in 1984, also connects with Oliver Anthony, who in his protest song also wished that US politicians would pay more attention to the well-being of miners. Still, Loach is the anti-Anthony, as his new film “The Old Oak” proves.
Completion of a trilogy
“The Old Oak” is part of a loose trilogy that began in 2016 with “I, Daniel Blake,” a film that won Loach his second Palme d’Or at Cannes that same year – he had already won the competition with his drama ten years earlier the Irish Civil War, “The Wind That Shakes The Barley”, – and continued in 2019 with “Sorry We Missed You”. While the 2016 film was about a widowed carpenter who, after a heart attack, was sent from the social welfare office to the employment office and back because no office felt responsible for him, which ultimately drove him to his death, “Sorry We Missed You” tells the story of a man A small-business parcel delivery worker who finds out first-hand how difficult it is in today’s England to provide for himself and his family without stable employment protection and trade union support.
A really big stage: the pub
Quelle: Wild Bunch Germany
“We felt like we were completing a small film series because the first two films were so tragic – tragic is perhaps too big a word – but we had seen really bad things happen in the social system and in the gig economy,” said Loach recently told the British “Guardian” about his work and that of his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty: “So much crystallized in one of the poorest areas of the country, which takes in more than its fair share of Syrian refugees,” is how Loach describes the motivation , “The Old Oak,” which, like “Wich Side Are You On,” is set in the Durham area.
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It actually does: The film begins with the arrival of a bus with refugees – we quickly learn that the Syrian civil war has brought them to northern England – in a place that is long past its best. Houses that no one moves into are bought up by anonymous investors at a fraction of their actual value, leaving local homeowners, often former miners, worried about their retirement security. The only public place left is “The Old Oak” pub owned by the dilapidated TJ Ballantyne. TJ’s wife left him and his son broke up with him.
A mistake
The eccentric with a social sense, whose most loyal companion is a little black dog who once ran up to him when he wanted to go into the water, is played by former firefighter Dave Turner, discovered by Loach himself, in his first leading role ever, with a mixture of laziness and deeper, serious eloquence. Soon this TJ makes a mistake, at least in the eyes of some of his regular customers. These are men of advanced age who often engage in verbal battles with other guests. The deeper reason for this seems to be injuries that date back to the time of the mountain farmers’ strike already mentioned: who was a strikebreaker back then and who wasn’t?
Others: April Marie and Yara
Quelle: Wild Bunch Germany
Among them: a school friend of the innkeeper who takes touching care of his seriously ill wife, who is confined to a wheelchair. Now they want to use the social room behind the bar at the Old Oak, which has been closed for years, for a political meeting to make it clear to the media and politicians how much they have been let down in their former mining village. Also with the Syrians, who see them as a threat. TJ refuses and refuses to be softened by his childhood friend, who had celebrated his engagement in those same rooms decades before.
What he denies them, however, TJ allows the Syrian Yara (played warmly and seriously at the same time by the Druze Ebla Mari, also in her first major film role), who suggests using the room to cook and eat together. This follows a belief of TJ’s late mother, which can be read among photographs from the strike period in the back room: “If we eat together, we stick together”. And so the room is spruced up together by residents and newcomers, and it’s not just the refugees who are served – ensuring that the often neglected children and young people of the town receive a warm meal is also the aim of this exercise in social and culinary community spirit.
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Foreign skilled workers
An unparalleled insult for some of the old residents of the village. And so the idyll doesn’t last long; a manipulated water pipe ruins the new place of solidarity. Whether he can be saved remains unclear until the end of the film. For Loach, as he says in the previously mentioned “Guardian” interview, it was a “pretty tough task”. He couldn’t imagine doing something like that again: “My short-term memory is failing, my eyesight is no longer what it used to be, and then there are all the natural shocks that the flesh is exposed to.” But he also says it was difficult for him to give up his job.
He will be missed
In what may be his last film, Loach asks a question that has been answered negatively more and more recently, including by protest singer Oliver Anthony: Can what is now technically called a “social question” be solved without excluding even weaker people? Is class politics incompatible with cosmopolitanism? Ken Loach’s hero TJ – and with him Loach himself – know that this is possible, even if it means hard work. And an unshakable hope that, contrary to what Yara’s Syrian friend says in her desperation, does not have to be considered something obscene.
But TJ knows even more: real community spirit also includes those who step down out of frustration and defeat: When Yara’s family receives the news that the missing father of the family has died in Syria, almost the entire village comes together to mourn – including that school friend of the innkeeper who could not forgive him for denying the room to a political meeting that would have turned against even weaker people. Angry citizens welcome.
As a viewer, you can call this cheesy in its forgiving nature. And at the same time fighting back tears during this penultimate scene of what may be the last Loach film – that’s just Loach. And that’s Loach too: in the last shot you see them all, old and new villagers, marching under the old union banner from the time of the miners’ strike. “Join a Union!”
The fact that someone like Ken Loach tries to find answers to questions that seem unsolvable means, above all, that he will be missed when he really stops.
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