Cathy Come Home

I watched 'Cathy Come Home' on UK television yesterday (Sunday 26 November 2006) evening. On each occasion, including the first, I have watched Ken Loach's 'Wednesday Play' several times over the past 30 years I have felt a great reluctance to put myself through the unswerving inevitability (listen to Ravel's 'Bolero', or read the description by Simone de Beauvoir of Jean-Paul Sartre and herself watching US 'western' movies) and the mounting agony of the simple plot. On each occasion, however, I am enticed and drawn into the movie by Loach's unsentimental, unsensationalised docudrama treatment (contrast with the recent BBC 'Horizon' docudrama on pandemic 'flu).

Loach's characters are Everyman and his Wife, who we are not invited to love, interacting with characterisations of people employed to run 'the system', who we are not invited to despise. Both the subject matter and the acting seem to belong to unexceptional BBC television drama/soap. However, the camera-work and editing are much less languid than a contemporary soap such as Coronation Street. I love the devices of having the voice of Cathy looking back to provide a commentary; and of providing factual information about homelessness in various parts of the UK (as Manuel Pueg does about homosexuality in his novel 'Kiss of the Spiderwoman', and John Fowles does about prostitution in Victorian London in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman').

The movie rehearses a range of myths about the apparent fecklessness of people who become homeless, unostentatiously exposing the patent fallacy of such myths. The movie shows how easily (and even arbitrarily) people can be knocked out of society into an effectively disenfranchised underclass. The movie shows how a couple of ordinary people, with ordinary aspirations, can be driven to shout at (i.e. to behave impolitely towards) officials of 'the system' who fail to hear (won't or can't?) the increasingly desperate plight of Cathy and her family. On several occasions during the movie (such as at the meeting of the householders who live near the caravan site, and the subsequent arson attack on the caravans; and when the baliff comes to evict them from the squat), the hypocrisy of the characters is suggested, although the scene is never devoid of sympathy for them.

... to be continued ...