Cinema Without Borders: Final call for solidarity - Ken Loach’s The Old Oak
It doesn’t take long for Ken Loach to underline the fact that the two warring factions we witness at the very start of his new film The Old Oak—the residents of a down and out, unnamed village in northeastern UK and the Syrian refugees given shelter there in the unoccupied homes—are two sides of the same coin.
The mining village had seen more prosperous times till the colliery accidents and strikes and the administrative apathy to the basic rights of the working class gradually reduced it to a mere ghost town. Ignored and unaccounted, its people are angry, frustrated and resentful ruing a miserable present while looking back at a thriving past and ahead at a hopeless, cynical future.
The tired and frightened Syrians, fleeing the war and violence at home, are trying to build a new home from scratch in a country and culture that’s alien to them. Some of them don’t even know the language to be able to converse with their neighbours.
However, even while they offload their many burdens and inner struggles in their persistent conflicts with the other, both are united in having faced enormous loss, have been denied agency to change their destinies and have the State to blame for their dire condition.
It’s the local pub The Old Oak, the only community space left, that becomes a site for their traumas—personal as well as collective—to find a release. Its present-day shabby glory and the precariously dangling letter “K” on the signboard is symbolic of the perilous state of the town and the many insecurities in the lives of its people. It represents a way of life that is gone forever. A place gone to seed over 30 years of steady neglect. The disintegration of the outer world and the sense of inner desperation and despair of its people, both old and new, go hand in hand.
Loach is sympathetic as he goes about explaining the socio-economic-political realities with a documentarian’s attention for facts and details and an activist’s zeal for seeking change. He doesn’t turn the xenophobic locals—even when they are complaining cretinously against the migrants, about their village becoming a “dumping ground” for “parasites”—into outright villains. He sees a possibility of reform. Resentment is inevitable, perhaps, when you see the prices of your prized homes, built with your hard-earned money, come crashing down, when you are forced to share the limited resources available to you with outsiders. It’s a hatred borne out of fear for one’s own wellbeing more than any real anger against the other.
Loach’s reproach and indictment are targeted at the government. Instead of focusing on the needy, the bureaucracy has let them down. He is optimistic when it comes to people themselves. Like TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) the owner of the pub where the locals and the Syrians meet, contest and collide. Ballantyne’s friendship with young Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate photographer, holds the promise of healing and restoration. Like them the two communities might come together some day and forge strong ties. The backroom of the pub, locked for twenty years, becomes a place to cook and share free community meals. As they say, “when you eat together, you stick together”. Or as someone from the group chimes, “sometimes in life there is no need for words, only food”.
Loach sees individuals as the ones with the power and confidence to turn things around with unity, compassion and community spirit as the agents of change. Too idealistic? Misplaced? Perhaps.
The Old Oak does get lumbering, didactic and a bit too on the nose with its messaging. The simplistic, naïve finale tugs at the heartstrings and plays with the audience's emotions in a cringingly obvious manner. However, strangely it leaves you utterly affected even when you are fully aware of your feelings being manipulated.
86-year-old Loach’s 14th film to feature In Competition at Cannes Film Festival might be one of his lesser works but that less is still a lot more than what we usually see most at the cinemas. Supposedly his last film, The Old Oak is a fitting final call for solidarity from a filmmaker who has stood steadily with the poor, downtrodden and deprived all through with his remarkable body of work.