Looks, Smiles. but No

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Harry Sloan reviews Ken Loach's film 'Looks and Smiles' shown last Wednesday (9.45pm, ITV).

SHAPELESS - but not accidental; mundane — but significant; interminable and inconclusive; colourless but compelling.

These descriptions apply equally to the film 'Looks and Smiles' and to the situation the film sets out to depict.

Shapeless is the life of Britain's thousands of unemployed youth and adults, denied a reterence point for their lives or the sense of identity and achievement a job can offer to them.

Yet their plight is not inevitable or accidental. It flows from the priorities of a capitalist society in which the profits of the exploiting capitalist minority are the decisive factor in shaping the lives of millions.

The film's apparently haphazard construction, with its bewildering variety of themes, seems deliberately to echo this shapelessness.

In the same way it vividly portrays the daily, unremarkable experience of being young, capable man; neither particularly intelligent nor stupid; neither down-and-out nor well-to-do; unemployed in a world of mass unemployment.

This may seem commonplace; but such reality is rarely featured on TV screens, which are more generally monopolised by the everyday life of millionaire folk (Dallas); by the concerns of the middle class; by American cops, or occasional voyeuristic forays into extremes of oppression presented in skin-deep liberal documentaries.

Idealistic

Loach and Hines make no ittempt to idealise or to lenigrate working class routh. They are shown ympathetically in the vorld which makes them hey way they are.

They may steal motorvikes and cars they can't ifford for joy-rides; young nales lie to eachother, ight over possession of ilent women and learn the echniques of oppressing hem. But they also find hemselves struggling gainst the odds to live up • impossible stereotype deals of masculinity • in he eyes of their mates. The amera • captures these noments - but does not ush to condemn.

For a youth fresh from chool, seeking a job with a trade in the 1980s can seem a never ending chase. Many never find one and eventually settle down with crushed hopes and wasted talents to a life in meaningless menial jobs or longterm unemployment.

Loach and Hines echo this side of youth unemployment in the sheer scale of wht is a dauntingly long but captivating film -and one which denies the viewer the easy escape of a neat "conclusion'. • Its central dilemma remains unresolved at the end.

Life without work, without structure, without hope, becomes life without colour or relief - a life for which it scarcely seems worth getting out of bed. Looks and Smiles heightens the drabness and monotony and acquires a kind of timeless quality by its deliberate use of black and white rather than colour film, combined with compelling photographic technique painting stark images of depression and neglect.

Compare

The main line of the film is in comparing and contrasting two young schoolRobert, Mick, Karen: facing ti leavers, Mick and Robert. Mick, a bright young would-be apprentice, has stayed on at school for his exams but still cannot find a job.

Robert has gone into the army. When he comes back on leave he spins yarns of his physical prowess, and flaunts fat pay packets. This adds further pressure to Mick, whose own unemployment and envy of the glamour he sees in the army are in any case pushing him towards this as a means of escape.

Against this pressure to enlist there is only the class-conscious warnings of Mick's father (who points to the strike-breaking role of the forces) and the emotional pressure applied by Mick's girlfriend, Karen.

Her hostility to him signing up stems both from her own need for support and affection, but also from revulsion at the increasingly brutal behaviour of Robert.

Indeed while Mick can że bleakness of Tory Britain be seen throughout the film to be marking time, unable to find himself, Robert can be seen to be rapidly changing under the influence of army life.

•Before he joins up, he and Mick get into a fight in a disco - and come off worst. On his first leave, he picks a return fight with the same youth - and wades viciously into the attack with boots flying.

Miserable

The army has taught him how to steal cars; new ways to abuse and exploit women; and by the time of his second leave, has given him a taste of violent, chauvinist hatred for the irish, and the experience of putting that into practice on the streets of Belfast. In the eyes of socialists, Robert presents a pretty miserable spectacle. But in Mick's eyes - and the eyes of many youth like him -he has status. He has a job in which he can prove his in himself; he has money in his pocket.

Instead of this, all Mick can see is endless, fruitless applications for apprenticeships in which hopes can ever be raised only to be dashed at the last minute in the fierce competition for every job.

Young people caught in this trap also. face the search for their own independent sources of emotional stability and support.

Even here unemployment intrudes: on his first date with Karen, Mick runs immediately i into a major blow to his self confidence. His dole money won't pay for two seats in the cinema: she has to pay - and his role as the dominant male in any relationship appears threatened.

Karen has a job and her problems are portrayed as more personal than economic in origin. Her mother's marriage has broken up. her father has gone off to Bristol: her mother has found a new bloke - and she finds it difficult to come to terms with this.

Her attempt to escape her problems - along with Mick - and find refuge with her father in Bristol prove abortive.

The film - with its main theme being that of "economic conscription" - does not attempt to deal with the problems of unemployed young women, for whom the option of the armed forces are not open as a comparable last resort.

Yet it shows beyond doubt that the bleak situation facing working class women is defined not only by the situation of the class as a whole but also by that of the men to whom they relate.

Looks and Smiles is no moralistic, didactic film. If anything, its remorseless realism and deliberate avoidance of a conclusion presents a rather too pessimistic picture. It gives no hint or guide as to what to do.

The final freeze-frame sees Mick, still undecided over the question of the

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SCIENCE "manhood"; he has pride