I
’m a singer,” susan says to stevie, shortly after they
meet-cute in Ken Loach’s 1991 labor comedy, Riff-Raff.
Stevie, an ex-thief played by a fresh-faced Robert Carlyle in
his breakthrough role, has found Susan’s handbag on the
construction site where he works, and gone round to her
house to return it. It’s not love at first sight, exactly—more
like a hopeful bet. Susan, played with sweet sympathy by a daffy,
rabbit-eyed Emer McCourt, explains, after much halting self-dep-
recation, that she has a gig coming up at a pub. The glass beads in
her hair tinkle musically against her earrings, live accompaniment
to her habit of pushing back her bangs. Everything about Susan is
nervy and New Age. She drinks green tea (“caffeine makes me
nervous”), consults an astrological book, and does the I Ching
daily. When Stevie explains his dream—he wants to merchandise
boxer shorts and colored socks—she bursts out laughing. Soon
after, Stevie brings his mates to the pub to hear Susan sing. Her
voice is thin; jeers from the crowd drive her off the stage in tears.
Susan may be a singer, but she’s no star.
Show-business stories like A Star Is Born or Begin Again hingeon talented protagonists in need of a break, while the genre of
genius-gone-off-the-rails, which has rarely been put more power-
fully or subversively on screen than in Alex Ross Perry’s recent
tour-de-force Her Smell, must show us true greatness in order to
make its demise believable. In Riff-Raff, the thrillingly unsenti-
mental Loach chooses instead to tell a story about unequal distri-
bution: the ordinary, workaday tragedy that talent is aligned with
ambition no more frequently than it is aligned with opportunity.
And whereas old Hollywood comedies and romances used poor
singing to show that a character was silly or a bad match—think
of Ralph Bellamy braying “Home on the Range” in The Awful
Tr u t h—Loach has a more compassionate approach.
Like Raining Stones, the drama Loach made two years later
about a man on the dole trying to scrape together the quid for
his daughter’s communion dress, Riff-Raff is grounded in an
unhurried realism. It revels in charming, raucous scenes on the
building site where black and white workers build apartments
for London’s luxury class while talking politics, ripping each
other off, taking the piss, and killing the rats that nest under the22 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019PLAYING ALONG Music and the movies
Same Old Song
In Ken Loach’s Riff-Raffa woman’s iffy singing yields unexpected depths
BY CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD
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