Family Life

Varttumisen tuska / Generationsklyftan / Wednesday's Child. GB © 1971 Kestrel Films. PC: Kestrel Films / An Anglo-EMI Presentation. P: Tony Garnett. D: Ken Loach. SC: David Mercer – based on his teleplay In Two Minds (Kahdessa maailmassa) (1967). DP: Charles Stewart - negative: 35 mm - Technicolor - 1,37:1. AD: William McCrow. M: Marc Wilkinson. "Down By The River" (Neil Young, from the album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969) sung in group therapy. S: Frederick Sharp, Gerry Humphreys. ED: Roy Watts. C: Sandy Ratcliff (Janice Baildon), Bill Dean (Mr. Baildon), Grace Cave (Mrs. Baildon), Malcom Tierney (Tim), Hilary Martyn (Barbara Baildon), Michael Riddall (Dr. Donaldson), Alan McNaughton (Mr. Carswell), Johnny Gee (man in the garden), Bernad Atha, Edwin Brown, Freddie Clemson, Alec Coleman, Jack Connell, Ellis Dale, Terry Duggan, Rossana Carofala, Muriel Hunt. Helsinki premiere: 15.2.1974 Orion, released by: Magna Filmi - telecast: 5.5.1989 YLE TV1 – VET 82313 – K16 – 2968 m / 108 min
    A vintage KAVI print with Finnish / Swedish subtitles viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki (History of the Cinema: New Wave in Britain), 8 Feb 2016 

BFI SCREENONLINE SYNOPSIS: "Janice is the rebellious daughter of lower-middle-class parents. Increasingly unable to cope with her behaviour, her parents seek help from a psychiatrist, and Janice is taken into residential care, 'for her own good'."

AA: A film about schizophrenia.

The third theatrical feature film directed by Ken Loach who had already created a strong oeuvre for television, often in collaboration with the producer Tony Garnett.

Family Life is a drama - a tragedy - involving psychotherapy, also about the conflict of two major trends of treatment. There is a humanistic approach involving personal contact, collaboration with the family, and group methods. And there is a medical approach involving strong medicament and electric shocks. Although the concrete methods have evolved (for instance, medicine is truly efficient nowadays) the general division of the two approaches remains topical.

Janice Baildon clearly has trouble, but we sense that with a little more understanding and affection she could overcome her difficulties. Ken Loach and his talented team of actors create a heartbreakingly convincing picture of a dysfunctional family. Janice's parents mean well but they are sadly out of touch and as they bully her to abortion they shatter her identity fundamentally. Janice's boyfriend and friends are very nice but not strong enough to resist interference and to truly give Janice a strongly rooted independent existence. Janice's most staunch champion in her nearest circle is her big sister who has taken the leap to independence and founded a family of her own. One of the most striking and memorable sequences in the movie is the horrible family reunion dinner where Janice is defended by her big sister. Yet Janice's parents are not monsters, they are just completely clueless.

Michael Riddall plays the sympathetic modern Dr. Donaldson whose open-minded approach would seem promising in helping Janice get back to life. The scene where Donaldson hears from the hospital staff that his term is being discontinued is another anthology piece in this movie.

The performances feel convincingly authentic. The film is quietly but deeply moving.

There is no visual flair in this movie which has been shot in a newsreel, quasi documentary style in flat, drab colour. There are both long takes and illuminating close-ups.

The print is clean with some "rain" in changeovers.

OUR PROGRAM NOTE BASED ON ROY ARMES. -  PHILIP KEMP AT BFI SCREENONLINE:
OUR PROGRAM NOTE BASED ON ROY ARMES. -  PHILIP KEMP AT BFI SCREENONLINE:

Kenneth Loach (s. 1936) on Oxfordista valmistunut lakimies, joka työskenneltyään jonkin aikaa teatterissa liittyi BBC:n tv-teatteriin 1963. Sarjatuotteista hän siirtyi nopeasti mukavampiin yksilödraamoihin ja vuonna 1965 alkoi yhteistyö dramaturgista tuottajaksi muuttuneen Tony Garnettin kanssa. Yhdessä parivaljakko teki muutamia 1960-luvun huomattavimpia tv-näytelmiä: Jeremy Standfordin kirjoittamaa asunnottomien perheiden ongelmia käsittelevää työtä Cathy Come Home (1966) luonnehdittiin ”vaikuttavimmaksi ajankohtaiseksi yhteiskunnalliseksi draamaksi mitä BBC on koskaan esittänyt".

Vuotta myöhemmin valmistui David Mercerin, mm. Karel Reiszin Morganin ja Alain Resnais'n Providencen, kirjoittajan tv-näytelmä In Two Minds, jonka pohjalta Mercer, Loach, ja Garnett muutamia vuosia myöhemmin työstivät elokuvan Family Life. Se osoittaa ryhmän naturalistisen tavan tehdä elokuvaa paljaimmillaan: Mercerin käsikirjoituksen puitteissa toiminta ja vuoropuhelu improvisoitiin pääosin amatöörinäyttelijöiden kanssa viikkoja kestäneen prosessin kuluessa.

Tuloksena elokuva vangitsee täydellisesti päältä katsoen arkisen perheasetelman ulkoiset rytmit jännitteet. Se näyttää kuinka perhe-elämän paineet vähitellen tuhoavat tyttären, Janicen, riistävät häneltä hänen elinvoimansa ja lopulta tytön koko otteen elämästä. Vähemmän muodolliset psykiatriset hoitomenetelmät antavat hieman toivoa hänen toipumisestaan, mutta sairaalassa tästä luovutaan, ja jäykkä järjestelmä pystyy asteittain lannistamaan ja laitostamaan Janicen, kunnes hän lopussa on vain mykkä, välinpitämätön kohde, jota käytetään havaintoesimerkkinä professorin luennolla. Elokuvan viimeiset sanat kuuluvat ”Onko teillä mitään kysymyksiä?”, mikä selvästi ilmaisee elokuvan poleemisen luonteen, R. D. Laingin hengessä toteutetun hyökkäyksen nykyisin vallalla olevaa psykiatrisen hoidon käytäntöä vastaan.

Tällaisena elokuva kuitenkin aiheuttaa muutamia ongelmia. Taitavuus jolla naturalistinen pintataso on viety läpi samaten kuin huolellisesti säädelty mutta näennäisen väistämätön putoaminen hulluuteen ovat tekijöitä jotka sallivat katsojalle vain emotionaalisen lähestymistavan, kun koko elokuva tuntuisi suorastaan huutavan perusteiden, vastaperusteiden keskustelevaa ja älyllistä rakennetta. Loachin ja Garnettin tyyli on intohimoisen mukaansatempaavaa, mutta heidän valitsemansa tyyli toimii sisäsyntyisesti sellaista etäännyttämistä ja asiaankuuluvien ristiriitojen paljastamista vastaan, joita tarvitaan Laingin teesien älyllisesti pätevään esittämiseen.

- Roy Armes (teoksesta A Critical History of British Cinema, 1978) ST

PHILIP KEMP (BFI SCREENONLINE)

Family Life marks Ken Loach's only cinematic collaboration with David Mercer, who also wrote Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) for Karel Reisz and Providence (1977) for Alain Resnais. Mercer took a fairly jaundiced view of the family, which he regarded as a breeding-ground for oppression, frustration and breakdown. In this, his views coincided with those of the Scots psychiatrist RD Laing, whose ideas were highly influential in the 1960s. Laing suggested that what society called 'mental dysfunction' or 'madness' was often the sole rational response to intolerable social pressures - inflicted, as often as not, by the family structure.

The story - adapted from Mercer's Wednesday Play 'In Two Minds' (BBC, tx. 1/3/1967; also directed by Loach) and shot in sober, quasi-documentary style - could be summed up by Philip Larkin's notorious opening of his 1971 poem 'This Be The Verse': "They f— you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do." Janice, the 19-year-old daughter of a lower-middle-class family, is ceaselessly berated and browbeaten by her parents while being assured that everything they do or say is "only for your own good". When she gets pregnant by her boyfriend - of whom, inevitably, her parents disapprove - they push her into having an abortion, then respond to her depression by taking her to a psychiatrist.

The first consultant she sees, Dr Donaldson, is open-minded and liberal, a follower of Laing and a believer in gentle group therapy. But when he's ousted by the hospital board - in a scene that finds Loach's satirical scalpel at its sharpest - Janice is transferred to a harsh regime of drugs and electro-convulsive therapy. In the film's final scene she's been reduced to a near-vegetable - passive, silent and unresponsive, exhibited to a smirking audience of medical students.

As Janice, Sandy Ratcliff is limited by the script to do little beyond reacting. Her parents, though, aren't shown as monsters; in their own way they're as much to be pitied as Janice, no less trapped by the conventions and assumptions of society. Her mother presents a figure of purse-lipped bourgeois rectitude, misguidedly sincere in pursuing what she sees as Janice's best interests; while her father, still conscious that his wife is a rung or two above him on the social scale, squirms uncomfortably when Donaldson quizzes him about their (evidently minimal) sex life. "She's a good woman," he mutters unhappily, "I can't complain."

Philip Kemp