Ladybird, Ladybird
Directed by Ken Loach
Screenplay by Rona Munro
Showing from mid-October at Dendy Cinema, Sydney
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
This is a sad tale of injustice at the hands of the British welfare bureaucracy. Maggie (played by Liverpudlian stand-up comedian Crissy Rock) survives a violent childhood only to become the victim of a series of violent relationships as an adult.
She flees with her four children to a women's refuge, but worse is to come. There is a fire in the refuge one night when Maggie goes to the pub, leaving her children locked in her room. The children are badly burned, and the welfare authorities take them from her.
Then Maggie meets Jorge, a muy simpatico Paraguayan exile (played by Chilean Vladimir Vega) and gets a chance for domestic bliss. But the welfare authorities just won't give them a go. If I tell you more, there will be no point in seeing this film.
We are told this relentless personal tragedy is based on a true story — something anyone who has tangled with similar welfare bureaucracies won't have any trouble believing.
But Ladybird, Ladybird is not one of Loach's best political films. The script is weighed down by liberal outrage. Maggie and Jorge are painted as such impotent victims and there is a depressing mood of hopelessness throughout the film. Perhaps this reflects the reality of life in the "under-class" in post-Thatcherite Britain, but one pathetic attempt to guilt-trip the audience convinced me of the nature of the film's message. It is an angry rebuke mis-aimed at the relatively comfortable but easily shockable middle class.
Of course in film as in literature, there will always be a place for conscience pricking. But while Charles Dickens gave us some picture of the social reality of those hard times, Ladybird, Ladybird's microcosmic focus cheats us of the broader social picture. Little bits of humour manage to keep the target audience from rushing out to slit their wrists, but the characters struggle in vain to lift themselves from caricatures culled from a radical social worker's casebook.