By Helene - 30 July 2021
In this time of personality and characteristics of the era, every box-office film, more or less wearing a gorgeous coat. This coat, can be as flamboyant as Parasite, can be as insolent as The Irishman, Once upon a time in Hollywood, or as Rome, Burning, look at the appearance of the plain but very dull. Over the years, you can think of nothing that makes people feel good but has some kind of selling point that isn't necessarily gimmicky but can't be avoided. Gradually, though, I began to wonder if my addiction to clever, fancy art was driving me further away from the real world. Is the film a sugar-coating charm, or a prism to reflect the real.
Such is the idea when Ken Loach's new film, Sorry We Missed You, is juxteted with the above film. In recent years, there have been so many films about class conflict, immigration, or affirmative action that the dearth of working-class films on the market may have contributed to the freshness in our eyes. But in fact, this freshness is exactly what the film disdains to excavate and present, and it is because of the removal of these floating ornaments and more shining.
The brilliance of the film is inseparable from the excellent performances of the two leading actors. Especially the heroine Abbie, with her gentle eyes and the attitude of neither servile nor overbearing, accurately shows us how people are further compressed under the pressure of life without losing their dignity. The scene in the hospital where she throws a tantrum at Maloney on the phone is also one of the most moving movie moments of 2019. The image is so touching, in large part because we see ourselves in it. Who doesn't have a boss who's constantly pushing, clients who don't care, and time lost in the daily race against deadlines and long commutes? We in their own life that effort and bite, insist and embarrassed, is not Abbie again and again in the brink of the struggle to maintain the attitude? A dignity that I believe transcends class, education and social status.
Ricky is a slightly different character. If The image of Abbie is more stable and refreshing, like a gurgling water, then the former is the dazzling sunshine, sometimes bright and sometimes too direct and rough. Like his son Seb, he was a risk taker, willing to double his efforts and double his fate on the choice he decided to make. This is a slightly angular and tragic character, but the director does not focus on and analyze the personal level of flaws, and does not too much empathy, but to shift attention to the systemic factors behind the tragedy. The film reveals how employers exploit workers in the name of empowerment in this efficiency first environment. The lack of basic living security, the disintegration of orderly family relationships, against the clock workers, under the guise of self-employment become slaves to the time and progress bar.
The film intentionally or not tells us that the economic division of labor, technological progress, and the upgrade of producers and consumers' pursuit of efficiency are complete and irreversible, but we often ignore its harm, or simply do not notice its occurrence. When human beings are still looking forward to a day when a machine will replace them, it is likely that they became that machine first. Ken Loach does not shy away from asking this question, but he also bravely offers a solution, or an attempt to rationalize it. Ricky staggered out of bed after his ordeal, left a note and went back to work. At the end of the movie, the boss Maloney and his wife Abbie are a good cop and a bad cop. They push their life forward magically.
I think that's what really moves people. Life is never carried on by any extra meaning or power, nor by anything metaphysical or ephemeral. Perhaps none of the once-believed answers we find in many other works has the strength of Ricky's note to his family. In fact, most conflicts do not burn because people always fall and rise almost instinctively, choosing to forget. I think the essence and the end of life is that we keep going the way we came, after we've been swallowed up by our own choices, battered by bad luck and not being strong enough.
