A MAN AGAINST THE MACHINATIONS OF THE MAN
If you have a heart, Palme d’Or winner, I, Daniel Blake, will make it bleed
With the 70th anniversary edition of the Cannes Film Festival underway, Canadian audiences can at last have a look at last year’s Palme d’Or recipient, which placed director Ken Loach in the rarefied ranks of the twotime winners, alongside Michael Haneke, the Dardenne brothers and others.
It’s a deceptively simple story. Daniel Blake, played by standup comic and sometimes actor
Dave Johns, is 59 and recovering from a mild heart attack in his hometown of Newcastle in the north of England. His doctor says he can’t work, at least for now.
But the local Jobcentre Plus says otherwise. It demands he apply for Job Seeker’s Allowance; basically Employment Insurance. He can also appeal to be put back on Employment and Support Allowance, a.k.a. disability benefits. (Other than bureaucratese, most of the film is spoken in Geordie, with English subtitles.)
Dan isn’t good with government forms, but the lifelong carpenter has horse sense and an intuitive knowledge of right and wrong. In the latter category, is having to wait on hold for an hour and 40 minutes (also the length of the film) on a government help line, listening to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons play while the actual seasons slowly pass.
Dan’s life takes a turn when he goes to the Jobcentre Plus office and meets Katie (Hayley Squires). The single mother from London with two kids had to take a government-appointed flat
400 kilometres from home after being kicked out by her landlord for complaining about a leaky roof. She’s being bounced around in the same bureaucratic ball pit. He stands up for her. They both get tossed out. A friendship is forged.
Loach’s social-realist roots go back to the 1960s, with films like Poor Cow, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird and his other Palme d’Or winner,
The Wind that Shakes the Barley. He’s quite capable of comedy — see the hilarious The Angels’ Share (2012) — but in this one, the laughter, when it comes, is bittersweet.
Poor Katie has plans to go back to school and do right by her kids, but the system keeps pushing her into corners.
When she’s caught shoplifting — she pays for her groceries while trying to smuggle out some feminine hygiene products — the shop lets it slide while the security guard offers her a job as an escort.
Meanwhile, Dan keeps trying to help Katie, while running through the hoops set up for him by the state: resumé-building classes, followed by mandatory searching for jobs he can’t take because of his health. You remember Charlie Chaplin getting caught in the gears of modernity in Modern Times? It’s still happening, only the gears
are now government forms, available online.
There’s an interesting subplot that I wish Loach had more time for, in which one of Dan’s young neighbours tries to make ends meet by selling black-market shoes from China.
Hard to blame the kid when a recent day’s work started at
5:30 a.m., ended 45 minutes later and earned him a pittance. He barely has ends to make meet.
I, Daniel Blake is a cry of individuality in the face of a dehumanizing system — one man against The Man. It continues a string of Palme d’Or winners that deal with harsh economic issues, as in Dheepan (2015), and Winter Sleep (2014). It will touch all but the most hardhearted.
In fact, I dare you to remain unmoved by its emotional finale.