Philip French Review of My Name Is Joe + Peter Mullan Interview

Glasgow strangers My Name Is Joe (105 mins, 15) Directed by Ken Loach; starring Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall Philip French, The Observer, Sunday 8 November 1998 In Ken Loach's last two movies, the highly romantic Land and Freedom and Carla's Song, working-class heroes leave a stifling Britain to take part in distant revolutionary wars where the common people are briefly united by a sense of idealistic purpose. In Loach's excellent new film, My Name Is Joe, scripted by Paul Laverty, author of Carla's Song, the eponymous 38-year-old Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan) has spent his whole life in a deprived area of Glasgow. He has come of age in a culture of unemployment where everyone is divided against each other and there's no prospect of participating in a revolution of any kind. The film is a tragi-comedy of love on the dole. It begins with the resilient Joe addressing a group of fellow alcoholics at an AA group- therapy session and proceeds briskly to his meeting cute Sarah Downie (Louise Goodall), a middle-class health visitor working at a hard-pressed medical centre. She drives her car in front of the van in which he's collecting the amateur football team of long-term unemployed lads he manages, and they end up at the same destination. Sarah's there to see Liam (David McKay) and Sabine Annmarie Kennedy), a pair of young ex-junkies and their small child; he's there because Liam is one of his footballers. She's a professional carer; he's an informal one, regarding the spirited, incompetent team (which he runs with Shanks, a close chum and fellow AA member) as his family; it's this which provides the moral and political basis of the film. Sarah is trying to make the system work; Joe is trying to survive within it and also turn a confidently cocky face to the world, as we see in the sharp-witted quips they exchange at their first meeting. But as a teenager, Sarah lost her mother, her beloved father has died recently, and she is lonely and uncertain about the value of her work. Joe has been sober for 10 months after violently beating his ex-girlfriend and is constantly embattled with the social services. Their relationship begins when he and Shanks (Gary Lewis) are photographed by a spy from the unemployment office papering Sarah's front-room; they find a mutual bond in nostalgia for pop songs of the Seventies; they become lovers when she's accidentally locked out of her flat and has to spend the night at his place. There is a depth and tenderness in their relationship that we haven't seen before in a Loach film, where the erotic has generally been identified in the exotic, specifically with Hispanic men and women providing the romantic interest in his three previous movies. And this love affair takes place within a rough, realistically observed world of poverty, but where the desolation of despair is tempered by a generous humour. As always with Loach, there is a set-piece sequence in which the anarchic heroes, subscribing to the precept that property is theft, rip off the petit-bourgeois world, in this case stealing a new strip for the team, transforming themselves from West Germany into Brazil, the shaven-headed Glaswegian Beckenbauer becoming an instant Pele. The affair between Joe and Sarah is sorely tested by a choice that touches on class and morality. 'We don't all live in this tidy world of yours,' he tells her. Liam and his wife are in hock to a local gangster McGowran (David Hayman), who deals in drugs, prostitution and loansharking. Unless they come up with an immediate pounds 500, their lives are at stake. When Joe intervenes, Sarah's life is also put at risk. To humiliate Joe, an insubordinate former employee of his, McGowran offers him the opportunity to clear the debt and, ironically, the only time Joe gets out of the grim city and into the beauty of the Highlands, he's on a corrupt and corrupting mission. My Name Is Joe is a passionate, compassionate and magnificently acted film. The social situation it presents seems hopeless and none of the characters is aware of any practicable solution. All they can do is snatch a few moments of pleasure and survive. But the essential human decency embodied in Loach's film by Joe, a man with a sense of responsibility for himself and others, gives the movie a hard, unsentimental and positive core.