The Old Oak review — Ken Loach returns to Cannes with combative refugee drama

“When I look through this camera, I choose to see some hope.” The words are spoken by young Syrian photographer Yari in The Old Oak, but it’s impossible not to hear in them too the voice of Ken Loach. The British stalwart has returned to the Cannes Film Festival at 86 with his 28th feature, his ire at injustice undimmed. Fifty-seven years after his indelible portrait of spiralling poverty, Cathy Come Home, Loach’s latest movie could be titled Yari Go Home. Such is the frosty welcome extended by some locals in the film to newly arrived political refugees from the Middle East to an unnamed village in England’s north-east.

The Oak of the title is a dilapidated local pub run by TJ Ballantyne and frequented by a small gaggle of regulars, the most vocal of whom come in for a “nice quiet pint” accompanied by loud torrents of noisy vitriol that begin “I’m no racist but . . . ” Weary publican Ballantyne (Dave Turner) has managed to keep his business afloat — just about — by “not sayin’ nowt”, but spends his little spare time doing small acts of kindness for the deprived, including Yari (Ebla Mari) and her family. The ramshackle back room of the boozer explains the hinterland, the walls bearing memories of what was once a coal-mining community and the solidarity that saw them through the 1984 miners’ strike: “When you eat together, you stick together.” Can this spirit be revived or do the divisions now run too deep?

The script by longtime Loach collaborator Paul Laverty isn’t shy of sloganeering, the villagers’ opposing voices often as studiously arranged as in an episode of Question Time. This mixed picture of a working-class community adds nuance but the dialogue doesn’t always swerve unsubtlety and at times seems to welcome head-on collision. Meanwhile, the pub setting can evoke a British soap feel, The Old Oak a Geordie offshoot of the Rovers Return or Queen Vic, the reliance on mostly non-professional actors at times keenly felt.

Yet the subject matter is bracingly contemporary and loaded with thorny complexity, the xenophobic rhetoric masking grievances that have been allowed to fester. Together with the portrait of a Kafkaesque benefits system in I, Daniel Blake (which won Loach a second Palme d’Or in 2016) and the zero-hours contract nightmare Sorry We Missed You, The Old Oak forms a scathing triptych of a Tory-led Britain through eyes of Laverty and Loach.

And while the director’s camerawork is as unflashy and unobtrusive as ever, it is still capable of capturing stirring images. The film’s most eloquent moment comes late on in a near-wordless scene as the locals step forward, one by one, to signal their solidarity with Yari’s family, recalling the Bedford Falls residents clutching bank deposits in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

Loach might agree with the sentiment of that title. Even after almost 60 years of chronicling privation and exploitation he is still admirably able to find the fundamental goodness in people. He insists this will be his last film, his one for the road, but like many a pub patron, he has said that before. Like an old oak himself, Loach remains steadfast, unswaying and true to his roots.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas in the UK and Ireland from September 29