1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 78: Ladybird, ladybird

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.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 71: War of the buttons

In the fifth and sixth grades, in Esmeraldas, I used to join my Room B classmates in the daily battle against the goons of Room A (and, occasionally, those of Room C, although those boys usually took our side). By “battle,” I mean we’d play soccer, fiercely, in the dirt – school uniforms be damned. I knew some of the boys were getting into trouble at home for this.

A rather rougher feud is the subject of War of the Buttons. The boys of Ballydowse and Carrickdowse, in County Cork, attend different schools; they can’t battle during recess, so they conduct after-hours warfare.

A Carrick boy calls a Bally boy a toss-pot. How bad is that word? To find out, the Bally boys bribe a younger child to say “toss-pot” to the priest. The priest chases the child out of the church.

The Bally boys sneak over to Carrickdowse at night and vandalize a billboard. The Carrick boys retaliate. Soon the two sides are taking prisoners and cutting off each other’s buttons, shoelaces, and neckties. This is hard on the Bally boys, who are poorer; the poorest among them are sure to get thrashed at home.

This only strengthens the resolve of one urchin: Fergus, the Bally boys’ brave leader. He instructs his troops to fight naked to avoid losing buttons; when they object, he imposes a fundraising scheme so they can buy more buttons. This tests their loyalty. Some grumble. Some commit treason. The feud, once two-sided, becomes more complex.

The movie begins with children aping grownups. Eventually, the grownups themselves, with their own resentments, which may have initially inspired the children’s conflict, get dragged into the war. Cutesy entertainment becomes dire parable.

The screenwriter, Colin Welland, won an Oscar for writing the great Chariots of Fire. He also won a BAFTA for acting in Ken Loach’s great Kes, playing a teacher who is kind to an oppressed but spirited little boy. There is a kind schoolmaster in Buttons, too, who looks after the downtrodden Fergus.

Welland himself was a teacher, as was Louis Pergaud, the author of the 1912 novel. A pacifist, Pergaud was conscripted in WW1, wounded, captured, and killed when his own side attacked the field hospital where he was convalescing. His novel was hugely popular in his native France. The French filmed it in 1962 and twice in 2011 – once setting it during WW2, with villagers, Jews, and Nazis.

I don’t know if any Irish strove to adapt the parable to their own society. This seems to have been an English endeavor. I don’t think it matters where it’s set. Like Truffaut’s Small Change, this is a tale of Urchins Everywhere, beginning, predictably, with their gusto and pluck and then slyly turning the spotlight upon their suffering – and on the differences between the boys.