Riff Raff

Riff-Raff is an early example of British director Ken Loach’s socio-politically, confrontational film-making, a style which he would develop with much more success in films such as My Name Is Joe (1998) and The Navigators (2002)

Robert Carlyle plays Stevie, a Scotsman just out of prison who is workiing as a labourer on a construction site in North London and living in a squat. Working conditions are lousy but Stevie tells himself that the job is a stepping stone to his own market stall. He meets Susan (Emer McCourt), an aspiring but not very good singer and she moves into the squat with him but they soon come to realize that dreams and reality are two very different things.

Whilst its spirit is commendable the problem with Loach’s film is that too much attention is given over to the building site and not enough to the relationship between Stevie and Susan. The former. with its cluster of hail-fellow-well-met likely lads and bullying Thatcherite overseers  gets repetitious whilst the former suddenly jumps from honeymoon highs to care-worn lows with nothing in between. And as much as Loach characteristically aspires to authenticity the film feels somewhat contrived. (Scriptwriter Bill Jesse, who died before the film was released, worked for years on construction sites and Loach cast only actors with construction experience including as Larry the Liverpuddlean Marxist, Ricky Tomlinson, who had been a member of the Shrewsbury Three, unionists who went to jail following Britain's 1972 building strike).

Carlyle, in his first feature film, never seems of a piece with his cohorts and always looks rather self-conscious amidst their incessant sledgiing. Also too many scenes are obviously staged to elicit our sympathy and sense of humour. On the other hand whilst reinforcing the authenticity. the various dialects, particularly Carlyle’s, are often difficult to follow (the film was sub-titled for its American release) not that we really need to understand what is being said to follow the simple story. One may also question the film’s literally inflammatory ending both within the narrative (would Stevie really have acted this way?) and as too Luddite-like to engender much sympathy for the workers.

FYI: Interested parties should compare this to the Dardennes’ thematically-similar film, The Promise (1996)

 

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