Film director Ken Loach (1936) never disappoints, I'm not saying this just because he probably never saluted the Queen, but mainly because his work in cinema also doesn't pay homage to her.
Ever since I first watched it, who knows how many years ago, in land and liberty, in the late 1990s, I never missed their releases again.
After Land and freedom, which made me agonize with hatred and sadness in the audience, I watched: Bread and roses; Winds of freedom; Looking for Eric; The part of the angels; Me, Daniel Blake; You were not here, which I saw just before the cinemas closed due to the pandemic; and now, The last pub.
From the films I've watched, I notice a director who since 2009, with Looking for Eric, turned his camera completely to everyday life, the most ordinary, seeking small novels based on the lives of ordinary people, such as the postman and his personal and family difficulties; the teenagers who are on probation and uncover corruption among millionaires; the carpenter Daniel Blake who finds himself in a tangle of difficulties using the social security system; and Ricky who works long hours every day to fulfill the deliveries of a mega e-commerce company and its consequences.
And now it's the turn of TJ Ballantyne, owner of a bar — it would be a typical neighborhood tavern if it were in Brazil — a former miner and union leader, son of a couple of union miners. He lives in a small town in economic decline due to the closure of mining operations that were the economic engine of the region for decades.
If you haven't seen the film yet, it's best to leave it for later, because although this isn't a review, my desire to record personal impressions tends to spoil the spell for those who haven't seen it yet. I was really thinking about whether it would be appropriate to write about the film... for those who won't miss out on anything and want to, let's go have a beer at TJ's bar.[I]...
One afternoon, the small town was impacted by the arrival of a bus with Syrian refugees. Even before the bus opened its doors, they were harshly received from the outside with xenophobic speeches such as: go back to your lands, leave us in peace, etc. A longer representation of the Brexit, since the United Kingdom chose not to even belong to the European Union, much less be tolerant of Syrian refugees, we can conclude.
One of the refugees, Yara, a photojournalist, carries a camera and, while still on the bus, takes a picture of one of the most agitated Englishmen. When she gets off the bus with her belongings, she leaves them on the floor. The man she is photographing picks up her camera and drops it, damaging it. She is left feeling upset. She goes into the bar and asks TJ for information, but he avoids answering. He does not want to be seen publicly as being against the community's feelings of rejection of refugees, although he thinks otherwise.
Yara is a special girl, perhaps overly Pollyannaish. She soon becomes close to TJ and starts talking to him, nurturing, over time, a true friendship.
Some time after he starts going to the bar (The old aok) to meet TJ, to the disapproval of most of the regulars, he discovers the abandoned annex at the back, a hall that in the past must have hosted large beer parties for workers, but that economic decline ended its operation, leaving it covered in cobwebs and dust, with only the small front room with a few tables and a counter remaining from the bar.
The mystical hall at the back housed memories of the village, especially photos from the time when the miners' unionists had political power and their heroism was recorded by TJ's uncle, a photographer. One of the photos contains the text: When you eat together, you stick together (when you eat together, you stay together). The photo immortalized the memory of one of the strikes that lasted the longest and in which, without wages, families used that back room to have something to eat, so they gathered what they had to eat, they were together and by being together they acted together, an idea that encouraged Yara to organize meetings on Sundays to bring refugees closer to the locals, since the latter were also suffering, although for other reasons.
Is there anything that more directly attacks neoliberal culture and its cult of individualism than being together and acting together, sharing the sum of the little that we individually have so that everyone can feed themselves equally? TJ belonged to a generation punished by Margaret Thatcher who forcibly imposed the culture of neoliberalism, she defended “there is no society, only individuals”, to recall one of her phrases that had the greatest reach and has been evoked to this day by coaches in his empty lectures idolizing individualism.
Yara convinced TJ and his hopeful companion to open the space. In a short time, they mobilized people, refugees and locals, who began to live there on Sundays, getting to know each other's difficulties, children who had little to eat, people with deep depression, and there they found small joint solutions. Loach's good utopianism, in the best possible sense, found fertile ground in those meetings. Only a small portion of xenophobic attendees criticized the initiative. There, a good deal of inconsistency in their arguments appears. Remember that one of them comes from an Irish family. After all, who owns the village if not all English people are actually English? Can Irish or Syrians?
From the encounters, Yara began to photograph ordinary people in their daily lives, in their joys and sorrows. She captivated them, but also increased the repulsion of others towards her, towards TJ, who welcomed her, and towards other people who saw no problem in living with refugees.
The film has scenes of expressive simplicity, I would choose four.
The first is the banner that the refugees produced with an ancient oak tree in the middle, with all its strength, the title of the film in English, where it is stated in the original: strength, solidarity resistance (strength, solidarity and resistance) and also the same text in Arabic. A bilingual flag that seeks to represent the meeting of two cultures marked by solidarity. And obviously, the banner, in its shape, looked little like a political flag, but more like a carpet, something specific to Arab culture, from where it came, the mixture of cultures finds in the piece an excellent representation of unity.
One of the most beautiful scenes is when they turn the pub annex into a cinema and project photos taken by Yara of the village's people and their culture. Women who no longer leave their homes, others who work, elderly people and children smiling, etc. There, I got the impression that Ken Loach wanted to introduce us to the cinema he seeks to produce and its meaning, perhaps he wanted to tell us: I film ordinary people entangled in situations of socioeconomic complexity. I thought that I and the other few people who watched the session occupied the same position in the seats as those people who were sitting in the improvised cinema at the back of the bar, there was no longer us and the others, the pronoun us included everyone. After all, we know what Ken Loach seeks with his films and if we were there following his work we could take the place of those same people we watched on our screen watching another screen. We were so much them that there was no way to distinguish them from us in the aesthetic representation.
A third point worth mentioning, something quite moving, and perhaps related to our culture marked by European values, occurred when TJ and Yara went to Durham Cathedral to collect donations. It is worth noting that, although she had cosmopolitan experiences, Yara's culture had Syrian references. Even so, she was enchanted by the architecture of the place and the mass-shaped choir, two objects that are indisputably European, but which did not lead to a form of exclusionary nationalism, one that denies the other.
The cathedral and its choir encouraged her to evolve, through catharsis, from the singular individual to the human race (as György Lukács argued in his aesthetics, with art playing the role of mediation between the singular and the universal). Yara was moved and found herself immersed in the feelings that belonged to that culture, not connected by the singular, but by human generality. There, she, TJ and all the other people belonged to the same human race; there were no more English or Syrians; the classification made no sense.
Ken Loach, an unmistakable atheist, paradoxically, used religion to allegorize that we are all equal since we belong to the human race. It was not from the perspective of identity particularities that Ken Loach wanted us to see his work, amen and oxalá.
But if the film has scenes of sublime beauty, there is also the smallness of the human being present through envy, betrayal, and hatred in the JW colleagues who sabotage the salon so that they cannot continue with the Sunday meetings. The contradiction between beauty and ugliness of the human being is there, dueling all the time.
Contradictions are part of the film and show us that there is no simplistic approach where the human is present. TJ is a man who suffered from deep depression, common in our times of individualism under the logic of every man for himself, and was abandoned by his wife and son. He lives modestly with a little dog. In one part, he remembers the day he thought about committing suicide, went to the beach, when the dog appeared and they began a beautiful relationship, she saved him. These are typical scenes of the devastation caused by neoliberalism, people's loneliness, depression, fragility in the face of the impulse to kill, intolerance, violence present in social networks and pets filling the voids left by fractured human relationships.
There is a scene where his dog runs away and is killed by a ferocious dog. Teenagers still make fun of him on social media, a breeding ground for the worst in people. The whole thing leads TJ to think about suicide again. The scene is terrifying, dystopian, and without a single gunshot or bomb explosion, the anguish is presented in the delicacy of feelings. Perhaps something proportionally sad here is the number of sessions dedicated to the film in theaters and the audience interested in it…
The end of the film is quite significant and I consider this to be the fourth scene. It is known from the beginning that Yara's father is a political prisoner and is constantly at risk of being killed. At the end, the family receives official news of his death in prison. People find out and the news spreads throughout the village. Soon the door of the house where they live becomes the site of a symbolic wake and the entire town goes to Yara and her mother to comfort them with hugs, flowers and candles for their loss.
Ken Loach emerges victorious, the solidarity of those who suffer will prevail to face the challenges of the present, no longer with miners' strikes, which do not even exist, but with ex-miners with refugees, the hopeless, the impoverished, the lonely, this battle will take place for what is common, the human generality, it is Ken Loach's ethics encouraging us to leave the zones of despair without the naive and simplistic search for particularized alternatives, without us and the others, but a pronoun we that includes everyone, however utopian it may seem, it is the option that remains for us.
It reminded me of György Lukács who once explained in an interview that cinema allows people to reflect on a situation by making them compare it to their own, and that in this way it achieved the objective it set out to achieve, not to present answers, but to present questions.[ii]
In such dark times, Ken Loach is a beacon of hope, when cinema has taken on the role of mere entertainment, he allows us to think so deeply about contemporary issues without losing sight of the socioeconomic, cultural, historical and geopolitical complexities. He does not give us answers, but he poses questions based on small experiences in that village that can well represent, in an aesthetic replacement, contemporary society.
*Wellington is a lawyer .
Reference
The Last Pub (The Old Oak)
United Kingdom, 2023, 113 minutes.
Director: Ken Loach.
Screenplay: Paul Laverty.
Director of Photography: Robbie Ryan
Cast: Dave Turner, Ebla Mari
Notes
[I] I only watched it once two weeks ago and may have been inaccurate in some details, but the gist of what I saw is this.
[ii] Lukacs, G. Chatting with Lukács. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1969, p. 212.
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