Ladybird Ladybird is Ken loach's harrowing story of a woman's fight to keep her children and her relationship intact. Maggie has had four children (by four different fathers) removed by Social services because of a previous violent relationship. When she meets Jorge a gentle Latin American refugee she gradually sees her chance of happiness but her history still haunts her. Once entangled with the social work bureaucracy she finds it difficult to break free.
Ladybird, Ladybird is a drama-documentary based on a true story about a British woman's dispute with Social Services over the care and custody of her four children whom she's had by four different fathers. She's lost them because in the eyes of social services, she cannot function responsibly. Looking at it from the mother's point of view, she's been persecuted by British social workers who slap her down every time she almost has her life together.
This raw and wrenching film's title is taken from the nursery rhyme about children in peril. It opens up full of promise. In a pub, Maggie played by the remarkable and imposing Crissy Rock, belts out a ballad and transfixes Jorge, played by Vladimir Vega, a Paraguayan exile settled in London. She tells him about her past. We learn that Maggie has a foul-mouthed temper and a troubled life. Having been abused as a child, she never learned basic survival and social skills, existing in chaos. Jorge on the other hand is gentle, extremely giving, supportive and very patient. She's a mother of four living in a refuge all by herself. We also discover that she was persistently hounded as an unfit parent by social workers who threatened to remove her children because of her tendency to have relationships with violent, drunken louts. We soon realise that those agencies are not merely presented as simply villainous. She is her own worst enemy, a walking disaster area. Nonetheless, Jorge's love and understanding finally break through her defences. He does his best to get Maggie back on her feet and encourages her to move in with him and start their own family with all the odds stacked up against them in modern Britain. You feel there is hope in this bleak landscape despite learning quickly that their happiness is fragile but tender and special and that's what keeps you glued until the end.
Ladybird, Ladybird really does provoke pity and anger but above all, thought. The film dissects this seemingly predictable tear-jerking docu-drama not only into a painful record from life but also into the harrowing gray reality of existence, as if using a microscope to examine the smallest particles. It therefore isn't simply a case of bureaucratic injustice even though it does escalate into exactly that before it's over. Neither is it necessary to see Maggie as a pure victim to appreciate the hellishness of her ordeal. This heart-rending piece looks at how racial prejudice can be seen as contributing to Maggie's uneasy relations with various social workers, most of whom are white; Her four children are a racially mixed group. Now her new husband Jorge is a foreigner with questionable British immigration papers. The workers never say anything overtly racist, they are too correct for that, but sometimes you can guess what they're thinking. They are monstrous precisely because they seem to apply rules without any regard for the human beings in front of them - and yet we can see their reasoning, as Maggie explodes again and again. We are left without doubt though, that her biggest problem is herself. She initially lost her kids when one night, she made an inexcusable mistake, leaving her children home alone while she went out singing and locking them in the flat for their own protection and a fire breaks out leaving one of her children badly burned. Subsequently volatile and quarrelsome, she picks fights with all the wrong people from foster parents to any authority figure, badly compounding the communications failure on all sides. She wants her children back, but sees the photograph of one of them in the newspaper, offered for adoption. Now starts her long ordeal.
We subsequently watch with hope and then horror, this record of a film as Maggie and Jorge prepare for a new start with a child of their own. The social services initial concern over whether Maggie can cope become more invasive and things turn into a brutal war between one woman and her husband and the monstrous bureaucracy, taking some ghastly and unimaginable turns. Yet Maggie keeps on fighting back with all her might and you come to admire her and want her to have a family, and to take charge of her life. Despite her own shortcomings you feel something isn't right when this woman has all her children kept away form her day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. This is highlighted quite brilliantly when a nurse in a hospital room cries at what she sees social services do to Maggie. You come to share Maggie's hopelessness and grief despite everything she's done wrong. We might not be able to forgive her but we understand her and sympathise with her.
This was apparently Crissy Rock's first film and she's not just given a good account of herself, she's performed like a seasoned veteran of the medium, acting with passionate intensity, elemental power and truth, railing terrifyingly at those around her in some of the film's most disturbing scenes. She showed mercurial range and a warm intimacy in scenes with Vladimir Vega, whose sympathetic presence softens Jorge's Prince Charming role. Some of the dialogue between the two is so natural and real - though not quite on par with some of the other Loach masterpieces such as My Name is Joe - you feel you know these people. Crissy Rock creates a woman with a big heart and big temper in equal measure. She likes to laugh but there is sadness inside. You feel like you can decipher so much for yourself to fill in the gaps of the story. Maggie is clearly looking for comfort, reassurance and a sense of belonging, and so she's a pushover for guys who buy her a drink and seem to care and therefore you understand how she's ended up in the terrible relationships she's endured. She screams, she cries and she rages against her fate. The rawness of her need and grief is like an open wound. At the same time though, we accept that she seems unfit to be a mother. But Jorge's presence is there to help her learn the hard lessons of maturity and balance and he, like we, see that she has an almost indomitable spirit.
Although a closing title says Maggie's life took a positive turn after the events seen here, the film does little to give credence to that possibility. Towards the end of the film, Maggie's fate has come to seem irremediably bleak, and Ken Loach has stirred a fierce sense of outrage. You feel that it didn't have to be this cruel. In Jorge she met that unique someone who really and truly cared and yet in spite of this wonderful foundation, it's still an uphill struggle. Some people have argued that Jorge is depicted as too much of a saint and Maggie's competence as a mother remains unexamined. I don't agree because it is the saintliness of Jorge that makes the film even more brutal and from the point of view of the social workers, Maggie isn't competent and that's what counts against her without showing her side of events because you still want her to be given the chance to keep her children.
Ken Loach is without doubt one of the best filmmakers working in cinema today. In fact he's been at the top of his game over the past six decades. It's clear to me that the director is attacking the methods of the social services and the bureaucracy of Tory Britain and defending the working classes. Yet Ken Loach has such a dialectical and flexible mind that he can effortlessly shift points of view, seeing the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony as he seeks the truth of his views honestly and convincingly. Ultimately he expresses what he deeply believes but not without allowing himself to weigh each living tissue and experience all its possibilities. He's a director who isn't a slave to his ideas and is able to immerse himself in life. He doesn't just assert his controlling idea but he wages it like a war over the enormously powerful forces that he has arrayed against it. This truly is a powerfully emotional piece of filmmaking.
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Ken Loach directs Liverpudlian stand-up comic Crissy Rock in this gritty drama. Maggie Conlon (Rock) is a downtrodden woman who has had her children taken away by the social services for being an unfit mother. When Maggie meets a kind and gentle Chilean refugee, they become lovers and move in together. The couple start a family, but Maggie's past history with the social services causes problems as it means that their newborn baby is in danger of being taken away.
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