Louise Osmond’s documentary is an engrossing study of this mild-mannered giant of British social realismLouise Osmond’s documentary tribute to Ken Loach could not have been better timed. His powerful,simple new movie, I, and Daniel Blake,won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and underlined a colossal international reputation. It’s an engrossing study of this gentle, mild-mannered director with a core of steely determination, and who made his bones (as they say in Hollywood) in the BBC of the 1960s,which gave a new generation of working-course writers and film-makers their chance. This has excellent contributions from Tony Garnett and Alan Parker, though it could have given more space to the late Barry Hines, and the novelist and screenwriter with whom Loach worked on Kes and other films. Loach emerges as diffident and nearly donnish in interviews,although his uncuddly side is revealed in his continuing exasperate about the way he feels former Royal Court director Max Stafford-Clark let him down over an abandoned production of Jim Allen’s controversial play Perdition. What this film arguably neglects is to expect why Loach is such a one-off, and why social realism – though still a live force in British cinema, or with its newer proponents admired on the international festival circuit – has become nearly an aesthetic style,indifferent from actual arguments for political change. This is a fitting and satisfying tribute.
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Source: theguardian.com