By Louis Kasatkin
Louis is editorial administrator at www.DestinyPoets.co.uk and founder of Destiny Poets and in his spare time is a civic, community, political activist, blogger and general nuisance to the status quo!
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| Louis Kasatkin |
Loach's latest "Sorry we missed you ", is nothing less than we ought to expect from him as an Auteur. It is a study in the arts of the polemical, it is a master-class in the morally courageous without lapsing into cant and by the very nature of its subject matter is unrivalled in its cinematic audacity.
To watch a cinematic,dramatic exposition of the everyday common vicissitudes experienced by ordinary people caught up in the soul-less machinations of the Capitalist behemoth is ,thanks to Loach's deft and unerring mastery of his art, a profound experience. Were it otherwise then all the world would have to see in "Sorry we missed you", would be ideological cant and sentimentalised agitprop aimed at the most impoverished intellectual common denominator.
This is very much a companion piece to his 2016, " I, Daniel Blake". Having centred on what happens to everyman ensnared in the vicious and cruel Welfare Benefits bureaucracy, Loach has expanded his critique of institutionalised social and economic marginalisation and exploitation with at times a blackly humourous capture of what happens when you're on zero hours contracts and enslaved to the fashionable neoliberal nostrums of the gig economy. Clearly Loach has ratcheted things up since "I, Daniel Blake" and that is really saying something.
Another observation might be that Loach doesn't present us the viewer with some sort of nightmare version of reality, because in truth reality is the nightmare. And with that come consequences.
As a political activist I have walked those streets, They are my streets, I have felt those blows directly and seen them aimed at too many others around me and seen the suffering that follows. For those reasons alone ,"Sorry we missed you" rang true and authentic for me.
"Loach has expanded his critique of institutionalised social and economic marginalisation and exploitation with at times a blackly humourous capture of what happens when you're on zero hours contracts and enslaved to the fashionable neoliberal nostrums of the gig economy"
ReplyDeleteVery apt elucidation of 21st century mega-metropolis life!