Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak” is set to start production this month. Here’s a synopsis:
It is set in a former coal-mining village that has never fully recovered from the closure of the mines. Its once-thriving, proud community struggles to keep old values alive amid growing anger and despondency, while few youngsters stick around
An influx of Syrian refugees, drawn by the abundance of cheap and available housing, brings in fresh blood but it is not clear whether the community will accept them and what it means for the last remaining pub The Old Oak.
Loach is coming off two well-received Cannes competition titles; the Palme d’Or winning “I, Daniel Blake” and 2019’s “Sorry We Missed You.”
In my Cannes review of the latter I wrote.
“Bless Loach’s heart. The man is relentless in his refusal to stop depicting working-class stories. After all, even his closest competitor, Mike Leigh, has dabbled outside his comfort zone in the past; not Loach, though, who was once retired but is back to tell the tales. Good on him. I will freely admit that his latest, “Sorry We Missed You,” got to me for its first hour or so, but it eventually became tiresome in its attempts to hammer on its anti-capitalist message. The miseries kept piling up, so much so that it felt like overload.”
In other words, in Loach’s last few films, we have been inundated with the kind of misery porn we’ve seen countless times before, but in better movies, starting with 1960’s Kitchen Sink dramas all the way to Leigh and Loach’s own marquee films. These are too predictable, too familiar to be truly singular.
Whenever Loach subtly goes for our gut instead of our tears, then we get to see shades of the man who gave us the masterful “Kes,”— still his best movie by the way.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.