What is it about British karaoke scenes that are so moving? Mike Leigh stages a lovely one in
All or Nothing. The sitcom
Benidorm, about a hotel for British tourists in Spain, concludes most episodes with karaoke. Some scenes are transcendent. (I don’t exaggerate.)
But
why is karaoke so effective? The words and notes aren’t the singer’s, but the individuality of the performance is. We glimpse the distinctive person through her appropriation of the music.
Ken Loach’s
Ladybird, Ladybird begins with karaoke. We observe several performers. Then the movie stays with one woman. A man in the audience is moved by her singing. He buys her a drink. He is Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a political refugee from Paraguay. She is Maggie (Chrissy Rock). She lives in a shelter. She’s had four children by four fathers. The state has taken them from her.
Hers is a terrible past. In flashbacks, we see the children forlornly trailing her through the streets as she brings home the shopping to an abusive boyfriend (the terrifying Ray Winstone). An accident occurs. The children are removed. Maggie visits them; one son has hung hellish drawings of the accident on his foster carer’s walls. Maggie lashes out at the carer, and at the social workers whose reports will determine the children’s placement. She doesn’t regain custody.
Jorge, the refugee, listens. He is kind. Maggie hardly can bring herself to trust him. But his optimism and good nature are formidable.
Maggie and Jorge make a home together. They conceive a child. Then truly horrific troubles begin. There is a parade of social workers, nurses, police, lawyers, and judges. Each does his or her bit to squash the couple. The neighbors are just as oppressive. There is no solidarity among members of the working class, no tidy escape into Marxian utopia.
Why pile misery upon misery, I wondered. Closing titles supply the answer: Maggie and Jorge are real people. They really suffered these things.
Maggie is not sentimentalized – not by the movie, and, despite his sympathy for her, not by Jorge. “We can see” the authorities’ “reasoning,”
Roger Ebert writes: “Maggie explodes again and again”; she chooses imprudently again and again. And yet the authorities are “monstrous precisely because they seem to apply rules without any regard for the human beings in front of them.” Social worker after disheveled social worker looks down upon volatile Maggie and gentle Jorge. Some pronounce judgment without having met the couple. Others, during Maggie’s supervised visits with the children, frown and bury their noses in psychology texts. They choose not to see the person.
This is why we can’t leave your children with you, one social worker says after Maggie explodes.
Can’t you see, Jorge tells the social worker,
this is a person in pain.
Jorge
sees Maggie. He’s virtually powerless, but seeing is something he can do. That’s the least
we should try to do, the movie argues. Loach has made other movies with this message, the most famous of which is
Kes (1969), about a beaten-down youngster whom a kind teacher notices and tries to build up in others’ sight. I respect Loach, and I find his movies absorbing. But I put off watching them. They’re just so sad.
There’s an ethos, or a philosophy, or a family of philosophies, called
personalism;
Martin Luther King Jr. and John Paul II advocated it. It doesn’t get much discussion in the academic mainstream. I’m not sure whether discussion would clarify it much. Perhaps it’s clearer what personalism is not. It isn’t “identitarian”; it doesn’t consider the Black or the prole or the social worker
first; it considers the
individual person first. What this comes to is hard to say. How could I see you apart from your social roles?
A good beginning, maybe, would be to listen to your karaoke.
P.S. Chrissy Rock also has a role in
Benidorm.
