Family Life (1971)

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Family Life (1971) – K. Loach

This early Ken Loach film (his third – and the one that immediately followed his first big hit, Kes, 1969) shows him continuing in a social realist vein, detailing the often grim lives of the working class in Britain.  In a style that echoes the concurrent documentaries by Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles, we observe interactions between members of a family in a tenement house and sometimes discussing their problems with a psychiatrist.  Wiseman may be the better reference point because Loach holds similar concerns about the amount of control placed on individuals by institutions – in this case, parents/family but also the psychiatric institution and society itself.  The screenplay was by David Mercer from his play, In Two Minds.  Sandy Ratcliff (who died this year, 2019) plays a 19-year-old-girl, living with her domineering parents.  She is clearly a victim of the generation gap and when she falls pregnant to her open-minded boyfriend, her mother forces her to have an abortion.  The resulting depression leads to much conflict at home and eventually her parents put her into a mental institution.  Fortunately, her ward/group is run by a progressive Laingian who clearly believes that parental and societal control are to blame for Janice’s problems; however, soon he is fired by the hospital and she is moved to a new ward and given drugs and shock therapy.  And things only get worse from that point on.  Some consider this film propaganda but despite the nonstop oppressive things that happen to Janice, this is a story that deserves to be told, even though it is over the top (or perhaps especially because it is over the top).  Loach is polemical but still allows us to see the confusion of the parents, themselves the product of a different era and subjected to the same types of control that they now seek to impose.  Obviously, it is a vicious cycle that keeps the working class in their place (in a factory or similar).  You probably want to choose an appropriate time to expose yourself to this one.