The bad : RAINING STONES - Ken Loach

Raining Stones, 1993

Directed by Kenneth Loach

Nationality : British

Box Office : ….

Prices : Jury’s Price, Cannes 1993

The particularity of Ken Loach, for me, is that he manages to insert jokes inside almost all of his movies, that represents for me the “British humour”. As if he wanted to show this quality we attribute to English people : the fact that they generally are very optimistic, even when things get rough (for what we see in his films).

Loach’s movies are almost documentaries as they are very realistic, the actors are non-professional, all the sets are real locations. The accents, the weather are very representative of  how we think of England (London excluded).

 

To come back to the humour in Loach’s movies, if you watch the trailer of his film Raining Stones (on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnkJmYo6sjE ), you’ll almost think it’s a comedy, until you see at the end the dramatic plot and how things finally end up turning bad.

The opening scene with the two men you see in the picture, chasing a sheep (so they can kill it and sell it on the black market) is to me, one of the funniest in the whole movie. They're almost burlesque as they are falling down, yelling and swearing while the sheep bleats.

Jokes aside, it shows the quest of a man who’s going to spend the whole movie trying to get enough money to buy his daughter the dress she deserves for her First Communion. A simple plot which brings a deeper and dramatic one in the end : the father, devoted to his family, to his religion, ends up in some bad situations as he tries to raise the money he needs (borrowing money from dangerous people, etc.). He’s not only doing this out of love, but also out of pride, which makes him risk everything (example : his family will be threatened by the men he borrowed money from).

Still, I painted a pretty dark picture, but the amazing thing, is that you will always manage to laugh at least once during the movie, which is categorized as a “dramatic comedy”.