LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD (Directed by Ken Loach. Starring Crissy Rock, Vladimir Vega)

Another true story. Or at least another story with some resemblance to the truth. But even if you can skirt around the controversy building up about the specific facts of the case (for facts aren’t always the same as truth, which is why a fiction like In The Name Of The Father remains more essentially truthful than the empty historical recreation of Gettysburg, also reviewed this issue), Ken Loach’s undeniably powerful film still seems riven with internal tension between the sheer conviction of the central performance and the director’s tendency to attack too many targets until he is almost lashing out blindly.

Loach, along with Mike Leigh, is the conscience of British film-making, yet seems to me most affecting when least didactic. Films like Kes, Riff Raff and Raining Stones have a resonance beyond the scope of more specifically politically targeted movies such as Fatherland or Hidden Agenda. Ladybird, Ladybird rests somewhere between the two arms of his movie-making. At its core is a dramatic love story between Maggie (Crissy Rock), a foul-mouthed, emotionally volatile, abused young mother with children in care, and Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a Latin American political exile who tries to help her break the cycle of abuse, rebuilding their lives with a family of their own.

But Loach ranges up the forces of evil against them, in the form of blindly bureaucratic social workers acting as agents of a Britain the director perceives as an almost totalitarian state. One suspects that the ill-defined character of Jorge is there essentially to provide a link between the despotism of Latin America and the rigid moral puritanism of Tory Britain. The single-mother is pursued and harassed like an enemy of the state, as if social workers were an arm of a fascist police force intent on wiping out working class breeders. There may well be underlying truth in this, but, as with Hidden Agenda, one catastrophe follows so relentlessly on the heels of another that the sense of contrivance and manipulation begins to verge on the farcical.

The film is both saved and almost derailed by the central performance. Despite the casting of stand up comedienne Rock in the starring role, there is little of the leavening humour of Roach’s recent work. Rock rips through the movie like a woman intent on exposing every nerve - a force of sheer anger rendered impotent because of her habit of turning it in on herself. It is a complex portrayal, but one that actually undermines Loach’s political point-scoring, for though we can see the maternal qualities the social services overlook, it does not make her easy to like. To the impartial observer, Maggie is a worse enemy to herself than the state could ever be.

Flawed but troubling, and powerfully felt, Ladybird, Ladybird is a feel bad movie that committed cinema-goers may consider the perfect antidote to the ‘one-note’ optimism of Hollywood’s feelgood blockbuster Forrest Gump. But be warned, despite the title, this is no children’s nursery rhyme.