Spine 561: Kes

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard. Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion release, we also get to talk about Loach's 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, which is positively Godardian in style, though politically harder-hitting than Godard would get outside his work with Jean-Pierre Gorin. In both films Loach appears to intuitively understand that the critique of traditional forms of art that the French New Wave was doing is an inherently political exercise, and Loach embraces its political nature without sacrificing the artistic form.