2023-05-26 22:09:46
Maybe it’s coincidence that the last film in Ken Loach’s filmography -she has already announced her withdrawal several times in the past, but it seems that this time she is serious- she will be the last of this year’s Palme d’Or contenders to appear at Cannes, but probably not.
For the festival, surely, to postpone as much as possible the world premiere of ‘The Old Oak’ -one day before the awards ceremony this Saturday- be also a way to postpone retirement with which he is united by a very special bond. With this year’s Loach will have added 17 participations in the competition of the contest, and has won twice the Palme d’Or. And the best thing that can be said about the film – because, given the circumstances, something good will have to be said – is that it is in perfect harmony with most of its predecessors.
Set in a town in the north of England. hit hard by the economic crisis, contemplates how coexistence in the community is put to the test with the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees. Much of the action takes place in an old pub that has photographs of proletarian struggles hanging on the walls and two clearly delimited spaces -solidarity prevails in one, racists impose their law in the other-, and whose parishioners have a tendency to explain with hair and marks, and sometimes in tears, their misfortunes and questionable ways of thinking. A place, in other words, that may well function as Loach’s film metaphordedicated almost entirely to defending the causes of the working class.
Like the pub, his films – at least the last 15, all of them made in collaboration with the screenwriter Paul Laverty– are populated by people who are either only very good or only very bad, and whose only dramatic function is to act as such; They are also stories that propose solutions that are too easy to very difficult problems, and that resort without hesitation or measure to both didacticism and exacerbated melodrama to get their message across and, incidentally, strike a chord with the viewer. ‘The Old Oak’, we say, is also all of that; in fact, few Loach movies are as good as her. And for that reason, considering the position that he has had to occupy in the career of his author, before her there is no choice but to take off his hat.
etruscan treasures
Especially since ‘Wonderland’ (2014), the Italian Alice Rohrwacher has been developing a narrative method that borrows from folklore and legends, the fantastic and the cinematographic heritage of his country and turns them into totally original films that only resemble each other. The one that this Friday has presented to the contest in the French contest, ‘La chimera’ accompanies a mysterious young man who is part of a gang of thieves who desecrate graves. They sell the antiquities to the highest bidder but he -who seems to have a supernatural ability to detect these treasures- does not do it for money, but to establish a interdimensional connection with the world of the dead and, specifically, with the woman who was his lover.
It is a film overflowing with symbols and metaphors -about esotericism and tarot, about the Etruscan feminist utopia- which, although it lacks the formal and conceptual precision of what is Rohrwacher’s masterpiece to date, ‘Lazzaro feliz’ ( 2018), confirms the director as one of the most unique and creative voices in today’s cinema.
#Ken #Loach #goodbye #Oak