Lending a hand to Syrian refugees, a County Durham pub owner endures derogatory comments from his customers.
While Syria has been in conflict for five years, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who runs the last pub in the neighborhood, The Old Oak, helps his friend Linda (Claire Rodgerson) welcome Syrian refugees. . Among the group is Yara (Ebla Mari), an aspiring photographer, who, shortly after her arrival, will be affected by the ambient misery that has reigned since the closure of the local mine.
“When we eat together, we stick together,” reads the young woman under one of the photos dating from the 1984 miners’ strike in the back room of the pub. The legend then gives him the idea to ask TJ to reopen this room in order to offer meals to English and Syrian families in need. This, however, causes discontent among TJ’s old friends and other pub regulars.
Almost 40 years after filming Which Side Are You On? (1984), a medium-length film in which he focused on the British miners’ strike under the government of Margaret Thatcher, Ken Loach bears witness to the decline of a mining town in the north-east of England in Our ad, selected in competition at Cannes last year. To the misery caused by neo-liberalism and the high unemployment rate, the great master of naturalist cinema contrasts that of the survivors of a civil war. If the proposal is daring, the treatment turns out to be rather melodramatic and a bit sentimentalist.
Written with the collaboration of his faithful accomplice Paul Laverty, this drama set in 2016 revisits themes that he had explored respectively in It’s a Free World… (2007) and Jimmy’s Hall (2014), namely immigration and the notion of belonging. The double gold medal for The Wind That Shakes the Barley And I, Daniel Blake It also deals in a Manichean way with ordinary racism, deeply rooted in the ignorance and withdrawal of identity among the pub’s faithful, and with solidarity.
This is divided into three movements, that between the people of the neighborhood who turn their backs on the refugees, that of the latter who stand together in the face of all forms of adversity, then that of the resilient from both camps who extend their hand towards others. In this regard, the exchanges between TJ and Yara, played by Dave Turner and Ebla Mari, screaming truth, offer the most moving moments of The Old Oak. However, despite the authenticity that emerges from this social painting, certain moments seem supported while the hasty conclusion seems stitched together.
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Drama
The Old Oak (V.F.: Our ad)
Ken Loach
Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, Claire Rodgerson
1:53 a.m.