Ken Loach - Riff-Raff (1990) :: top Movie Channel

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Review (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
Strange that the British Riff-Raff and the American Mac should come out so
closely together, both dealing with the everyday lives of working men in the construction
trades. The differences between the two films are revealing about the differences between
the two cultures. John Turturro's Mac shows a young carpenter determined to work hard,
get ahead, start his own construction company, and buy a piece of the American dream. Ken
Loach's Riff-Raff shows laborers who are alienated from the very idea of management and
see themselves as proletarian outsiders.

Partly that's a function of the more rigid class system in Britain and the relative
freedom of social movement in this country.

It also reflects the different places that the two screenplays come from. Riff-Raff was
written by Bill Jesse, a construction worker, who died as the film was being completed. It
reflects his unromantic, irreverent view of the world. Mac was written by Turturro, who
based it on his own father's life. The title character, the son of Italian-American
immigrants, is able to move up in the world, just as Turturro has.

Riff-Raff centers on a construction job in London, where 19th century housing, recently
renting for very little, is being renovated into town homes for the rich. The workers on
the job are nomadic and homeless; many come from outside London and live in "squats," or
empty flats, that they open with a crowbar. Their boss is a loud, aggressive site manager
whose threats mostly involve his cheerful willingness to fire them.

We meet several of the workers and get to know them. One is a young Scotsman, who in the
course of the film moves in with a woman who claims to be a poet and folk singer but whose
most sincere interest is in drugs. Another is a lifelong leftist who analyzes the
situation in terms of the class struggle.

Three are blacks - one of Caribbean descent, who wants to visit Africa, and two from
Africa, who laugh at his desire.

The men form a rough camaraderie on the job, held together by a certain pride in their
labor and a mutual hatred of the contractors and developers - who are cutting corners in
every way they can, including safety. We also see them off the job, in pubs and in their
squats, and eventually it sinks in that they don't see much future in their work or their
lives, and view Britain as a society that excludes them.

Yet Riff-Raff is in many ways a comedy, directed by Ken Loach, whose working-class
subjects over the years have included a boy's love for his bird in Kes (1971) and a
police plot against liberal politicians in Hidden Agenda (1990). There is great humor in
the scene where the leftist worker is found using a newly installed bathtub as rich buyers
are shown through the flat, and humor, too, in the verbal sparring that goes on throughout
the film.

In one scene, the only worker with a bank account negotiates charges for cashing the
others' checks, and the dialogue is thick with irony when they try to go back on their
deal.