Loach's new film a sleeper hit

By PETER CALDER

So softly spoken he sounds almost diffident, Ken Loach is anything but the model of a political firebrand. But the fire at the heart of his films is a slow burn, the fury simmering rather than boiling.

Since he started making movies in the 1960s - his feature debut, a made-for-TV drama about a teenage runaway called Cathy Come Home, was followed by the unsentimental feature, Kes, about a small boy's love for his pet falcon - Loach has consistently championed the plight of Britain's working class.

Along the way with films such as Riff Raff, Ladybird, Ladybird and My Name Is Joe he effectively invented the format we now call docudrama.

Using long lenses so as to keep an unobtrusive distance, he shoots long, unadorned takes. Often only a few seconds of them find their way into the finished film. The result is a kind of hyper-naturalism which can give the impression of being unscripted, although his films' art resides in the way they disguise their artifice.

What has always been distinctive about a Ken Loach film is the way it wraps its sharp political edges in utterly specific human stories, zooming in on individuals squeezed by the social context in which they live.

His latest, The Navigators, is set in South Yorkshire, but the story's political agenda will seem depressingly familiar to anyone here who ever wondered at the wisdom of two decades of privatisation.

The title refers to railtrack maintenance crews (their name "navigators" gives us the word "navvies") who arrive at their depot one morning to find that they are instant employees of the blandly named North Midlands Infrastructure and working in competition with colleagues they always called mates.

Before long they are being squeezed by a management desperate for efficiencies: manning levels drop, redundancies mount, corners are cut and the inevitable disaster follows.

It would seem implausible - especially the scene in which workers are ordered to smash good equipment so competitors can't get hold of it - if it hadn't all happened.

Loach says the story was pitched to him by Rob Dawber, a lifelong railwayman.

"He wrote to me after he had been made redundant and said that what had happened was such a con-trick and there are tragedies waiting to happen."

Loach was attracted to the idea, he says, because he enjoys films that are about groups of people, and certainly the group scenes in The Navigators are among its best. The novice Dawber developed a script under the guidance of the 66-year-old director which depicted the specific story of a depot of men being gradually whittled away by the wider social reality of privatisation.

"What happened in that process," he says, "was a conscious deliberate attempt to destroy the railway culture which had been handed on from generation to generation, along with safe practices and trade union solidarity. The irony is that now it's being carried on by a government which ostensibly represents organised labour."

Dawber's story has a sad ending: diagnosed with the asbestos-related lung disease mesothelioma, he died just before the film's sound mix was finished, although Loach says he saw a cut which was close to the final one.

He also lived to see a compensation payout of £100,000 ($300,000), which he had sought on the basis that his disease was caused by an unsafe work environment. The payout was boosted by testimony from Loach that Dawber had a promising future as a writer.

"The payout is based not on the value of a human life, but on its earning capacity," Loach says with an almost audible shrug. You can tell he's pleased for Dawber's bereaved dependents, but gloomy about civil law which, like economic reform, reduces humans to numbers on a balance sheet.

It's the human element, in the end, that Loach seeks to capture.

"Obviously we try to do films which are broader than just having a political agenda.

"In most films, you start with the truth of what's happening between people. Everything has to be true to that. And as you work through the nub of a human situation, you reveal the complexity of the relationships and the social circumstances that circumscribe those relationships because no one lives in a vacuum, everyone lives in a context."

It would be easy to mistake Loach's shy, quiet manner for tiredness (and easy to understand if he felt like withdrawing from the fray). But his productivity seems undimmed.

His latest film, Sweet Sixteen, is set in a depressed Scottish housing estate where a teenager with a drug-addict mother in prison struggles to break free of his past. Well-received at Cannes, it seems likely to be another example of his speaking up for those whose voices are seldom heard. It's tempting to wonder whether he tires of waving the flag.

"I suppose you keep battling on," he says, cheerfully, "because it's endlessly interesting and varied."

If he ever believed his films would change the world, he's a wiser man now.

"But it's another shoulder to the wheel, another voice in the chorus.

"We made The Navigators to contribute to the discussion and give support to those who are campaigning for re-nationalisation. All a film does is contribute.

"It's one other voice among lots of other voices, isn't it?

"Whatever makes up the general consciousness of any one time is made up of all kinds of experiences. You try to be a small, still voice in among that."

And, unsurprisingly, he prizes his subjects more highly than his work.

"Making films is a fairly easy option," he concludes. "If the people who work on the front line can put up a struggle, it's no big hardship to make a film about it."

* The Navigators opens today at the Rialto Cinema in Auckland.