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"This is not going to end well," said Adam Driver once more in "The Dead Do not Die," the zombie film Jim Jarmusch which opened Tuesday the Cannes Film Festival. And when "Sorry, we missed you" Ken Loach was created Thursday in Cannes, with a scene in which an unemployed worker is hired for a job that seems to have a lot of links, it's hard not to think that Driver & # 39; s dark forecasts will also be valid in this setting.
But it's not the zombies that make the perspectives so dark for the characters of "Sorry, we missed you". It is rather the fate of the British working class, which in many Loach films is constantly beset by larger forces – sometimes government forces, sometimes the forces of commerce, sometimes a brutal mix that serves to strike and to dehumanize the average worker.
"Sorry, we missed you" takes up Loach's usual preoccupations and paints them in broad, thick lines; it is sometimes a sober study, more often a sharp and angry controversy about how good people can be beaten. This is the kind of film in which the camera goes down a street of the working class and where the dog that has been walked has only three legs.
In other words, it's not a subtle film, and its frankness is sometimes powerful, but equally tiring.
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Loach arrives in Cannes in an enviable but also strange position. "Sorry, we missed you" is one of the two leading contestants who could set a new record by winning a third Gold Palm for his director, after Loach's wins for "The Le wind shaking barley "in 2006 and" Me, Daniel Blake "in 2016.
But this last victory was not popular at the time and it did not age well. While "I, Daniel Blake" is a moving drama with two outstanding performances at its center, he sometimes felt laborious and constituted such a serious element of the bustle of the Loach working class that he did not This year, films such as "Toni Erdmann", "American Honey", "Personal Shopper" and "Paterson" were selected in Cannes.
Admittedly, the jury of Alejandro G. Inarritu this year will probably not be much interested in what the jury of George Miller did in 2016, and it is unfair to hold "I, Daniel Blake" (which was after all a good movie) against "Sorry We Missed". You. But just three years after his last Palme, it's hard to find a lot of cool things about Loach's new film, as effective as it may be.
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As usual for Loach, the protagonist is a working-class man who has trouble getting out of it. In this case, it is Ricky (Kris Hitchen), father of two children who is drowning in debt and is unemployed when he is offered a position of driver-deliverer. The problem, presented as an opportunity by his new boss, is that he will not be an employee – he will be independent, which will make him responsible for all kinds of potentially debilitating financial and personal consequences.
Ricky's wife, Abby (Debbie Honeywood), is also overworked as a caregiver for the elderly and infirm; together, they can hardly find time to be with their own kids, a troubled teen graffiti artist and a girl traumatized by what happens to her family.
It's a Loach film, which means that the performances are natural and lived, even when the things around them become a little bland. (An old woman proudly showing her 1984 Miners' Strike album is a particularly loachian interlude.)
But while the heart of "me, Daniel Blake" was in the touching performances of Dave Johns and Hayley Squires, Hitchen and Honeywood are playing well, but are struggling to record as much as symbols of the brutality of the working class – well that she cuts through the increasingly melodramatic tone of the film with a profane diatribe that has been applauded by the normally jaded Cannes press.
Loach is working effectively in this area and "Sorry to have missed you" is timely for the era of global economic uncertainty. However, he has a hard time feeling like it's anything but a seasoned director who crisscrossed a familiar territory without finding anything new to say.
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