Riff-Raff (1991) - film review

After completing a short stretch in prison for theft, young Glaswegian Stevie heads South and finds work on a construction site in London.  His employers take a relaxed approach when it comes to safety standards – i.e. there aren’t any – but the workers don’t complain because they can work under false identities, enabling them to carry on claiming benefits.  Anyone who mucks around or so much as hints at putting in a claim for more pay or better working conditions is summarily dismissed.  It is the early 1990s, the economy is depressed and work is hard to come by.  Stevie is happy to have a job and is happier still when he meets Susan, an aspiring young singer...

Despite his early success with Kes (1970), British director Ken Loach had difficulty raising money to finance full-lengths films throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s.  After a brief foray into commercial cinema with Hidden Agenda (1990), Loach was able to make an important social drama that would effectively re-start his career in the 1990s.  That film, Riff-Raff, provided a powerful indictment of post-Thatcherite Britain and is considered one of Loach’s best films, a masterful concoction of social realism, drama and satire.

Employing actors who had previous experience of working on building sites – including Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson – allowed Loach to achieve a striking naturalism, which he accentuated through improvisational acting techniques, documentary-style camerawork and sparse use of music.  Despite its low budget and hasty production schedule, Riff-Raff is an absorbing, well-crafted piece of cinema.  It offers a vivid and honest account of how those at the lower end of the social spectrum fared after the flawed policies of the Thatcher administration had virtually wrecked the social fabric of the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Despite its bleak subject matter, Riff-Raff manages to be one of Ken Loach’s most accessible films.  Along with the hard-edged realism and obvious left-wing politicking there is also a great deal of feckless humour.  Admittedly, much of the comedy has a distinctly poisonous edge and is a tad contrived – e.g. a party of nuns walking into a bathroom to find Ricky Tomlinson butt naked – but it does provide an effective counterpoint to the dreary reality of men being sworn at, victimised and generally exploited on a building site by the vermin that Thatcher created.  The sequence in the crematorium gardens (in which the mourners end up being covered in the remains of the dearly parted) is the most amusing of any Ken Loach film, even if it is – er – every so slightly sick.  These fleeting comic asides remind us that even when life is at its grimmest there is always something to smile at.

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