Desk Notes No.17

Let it rain down: Ken Loach & Annie Ernaux

Aug 27, 2023

Dear friends,

Since I wrote last, we’ve endured one of the wettest Julys in British history. August hasn’t felt much better, with the newspapers frequently asking, ‘When will it stop raining?’ The garden has suffered less from the deluge than from the ceaseless cloud. I’ve picked just three courgettes and a few handfuls of peas. Planted in the sunniest spot, the winter squash thrived briefly before anticipating autumn. The few fruits are already ripening to a vivid orange and the greenery beginning to die back. Meanwhile, the flowers have found relief from my poor, sandy soil in the rain, growing at least a foot taller than usual. What they have gained in height they have lost in blooms. The jewel of my late summer garden, the pom-pom ‘Dahlia Genova’ is more green than purple. I’ve barely been able to get outside and give her a feed. I’ve missed morning walks, National Trust gardens, day trips to the seaside. Rain seems to put life on hold. It isn’t the same in fiction.

I’m reminded of a line from the book Cinema As Weather by Kristi McKim:

“Rain makes characters do something, whether finding and opening an umbrella, seeking shelter, or passionately refusing shelter.”

In the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright has Mr Darcy propose outside during a cloudburst. The intense rain both symbolises and facilitates an emotional outpour. Elizabeth Bennet is already breathless from her dash for shelter, her heart racing, when Darcy surprises her. His proposal is barely inaudible over the heavy raindrops, they have to raise their voices, passions rise too. Speaking about the influence of this adaptation on his own film Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn tells the Hollywood Reporter:

“They’re finally confronting each other. They’re finally articulating things they’ve held close to the chest throughout the film. I think a big part of that is because of the rain. You want to get out of the rain. These characters are wet and angry. I think there’s something about rain that just ups the stakes. At one point, the studio had suggested we lose the rain because it’s expensive. It’s a pain in the butt. It’s going to slow you down. But Joel and I both felt very strongly about it because there is an emotional reason why the rain is there. I think that these characters wouldn’t be as truthful to each other, there wouldn’t be as much immediacy and urgency to say these words, if it weren’t raining during the scene.”

Cinematic rain is expensive to produce but as McKim puts it, “In many examples, rain manifests otherwise latent desire; the sound and image of rain accelerate the pacing and intensify the sensation of the scene.” For others, like Woody Allen, rain is simply beautiful. The softening effect of grey clouds exudes an intimacy that’s reflected in the plot as characters are pushed indoors:

“When it rains suddenly the people have to stay inside the house, they have to be together, and it becomes more intimate. It gives an atmosphere for more intimate things to happen, whether it’s falling in love or in other ways sharing a togetherness.”

Isn’t this a much nicer way to think about the rain?

In this edition of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about in August.

Screen - ‘Raining Stones’, directed by Ken Loach (1993), now showing on MUBI

Print - ‘I Remain in Darkness’ by Annie Ernaux, Fitzcarraldo Editions

Screen

‘Raining Stones’, directed by Ken Loach (1993), now showing on MUBI

In a recent interview with The Guardian about her debut film Scrapper, writer-director Charlotte Regan said, “A lot of working-class cinema I grew up watching was so joyless.” I can see her point. I think back to the films of Ken Loach in the 1990s and early 2000s — films that made a huge impact on me. Sweet Sixteen sees a teenager struggle to raise money for his mother about to be released from prison; and Ladybird Ladybird, based on the true story of a woman who has all her children removed by social services. I’m yet to see a more harrowing film.

A year earlier, Loach made Raining Stones, a drama about long-term unemployment and one man’s determination to buy his daughter’s First Communion dress. Woven into the desolation are two beautiful, often funny, performances from Ricky Tomlinson (The Royale Family) and Bruce Jones (best known for playing Coronation Street’s Les Battersby). The film opens on the drizzly moors, Tommy and Bob sliding around in the mud trying to rustle sheep neither of them have the heart to kill.

Living on the breadline makes life chaotic, one false move and everything collapses like a house of cards. When Tommy leaves the keys in Bob’s van it’s immediately stolen, leaving Bob unable to get any work at all. The pair find themselves in scrape after scrape — stealing turf from the local Conservative Club or cleaning disgusting drains. These men are born grafters, trained for work that no longer exists; willing to take on any legitimate employment but pushed towards soft criminality by the very necessities of life. Their community is left to fend for itself, forgotten by government and wider society. The contrast is stark between Bob’s block of flats and the middle-class semis where he door-knocks for work; each time turned away with a barrage of excuses, timed for comedy with a undertone of heartbreak.

What fascinates me most about Raining Stones is its commentary on long-term unemployment and its likely impact on the next generation. Bob and Tommy watch the young people around them with regret and compassion.

“What chance have they got? One or two might slip through the net, but for the rest of them, it’s mapped out. It’s all cut-and-dried. They’ve got no work, no hope. It’s all despair. All’s they’ve got is crime, booze, drugs. Families just breaking up. And you know, it could be a lovely estate to live on. We’re like punch-drunk fighters hammering at each other instead of us getting together and sharing around the power for us to make all the changes.”

Growing up in the former mining towns of North-Nottinghamshire at the time Raining Stones was made, it feels very close to the bone. Ken Loach has been making films like this for over fifty years. That they still feel relevant is a damning indictment on our society and our government. And yet, history shows us that industry closures and long-term unemployment have been a problem time and again. Researching the Lancashire Cotton Famine for my Instagram posts this week, I discover that in 1863 The Westminster Review described the long-term unemployment of cotton workers as, “a national calamity… The standard of comfort and industry once lost, a generation may be required to restore it.” The writers describe devastating impacts on the wider community and economy that closely resemble the social impact of pit and factory closures in the 1980s. Perhaps most shockingly, they write:

“Government, we all know, especially in home matters, and still more in complex social questions, never does anything till it is forced… The very worst mistake that could befall the public mind would be the blind trust in something turning up, or the confused notion of things mending by themselves.”

A warning from the past, if ever there was one.

Print

‘I Remain in Darkness’ by Annie Ernaux

“‘I remain in darkness’ was the last sentence my mother ever wrote.”

When the preface to a book makes you cry, should you really keep reading?

Having lost my Grandmother to Parkinson’s disease and with an uncle now suffering from vascular dementia, I hoped Annie Ernaux’s book about her own mother’s Alzheimer’s would be a cathartic experience. I was wrong.

Ernaux would like us to read this original, unedited diary of her mother’s stay in a geriatric ward, “merely as vestiges of pain.” The emotions are raw, the language at times brutal. And yet, as I’ve come to expect from Ernaux, it is frequently beautiful, relatable and honest. In this case perhaps, because the diary was written without any intention to publish. In 1986, in the wake of her mother’s death, Ernaux worked on A Woman’s Story — an effort to understand her mother’s early life and their relationship. The decision to publish the diaries came only later, in 1997. It is this openness to reflect on the writing process within the text itself that keeps me coming back to Ernaux’s work.

“While I was writing [A Woman’s Story], I could not bring myself to read through the notes I had taken during my mother’s illness. Somehow I felt I hadn’t the right: I had committed to paper her last months and days, including the day preceding her death, without realising it. This disregard for consequences — which may characterise all forms of writing, it certainly applies to mine — was horrifying. In a strange way, the journal of those hospital visits was leading me to my mother’s death… Now I have come round to thinking that the consistency and coherence achieved in any written work — even when its innermost contradictions are laid bare — must be questioned whenever possible. By making these pages public, I am given an opportunity to do so.”

The writing is visceral, the imagery unpleasant — pale flesh, nakedness, incontinence — painful to read because it confronts our wish for dignity; our desire to treat older people with reverence. Oscillating between ruthless and tender prose, Ernaux captures the incongruity of life, identity and ageing; our eagerness to separate the elderly from passion and feeling:

“Her roommate was strutting around in the heat in a fur coat, dangling her handbag, just like an old whore.”

“I have no idea what she thought of sex or how she made love. On the face of it sex was the ultimate evil. But in real life?”

At the heart of the book lies the relationship between mothers and daughters — an emotional relationship and a physical one. There is a sense of inevitability. Ernaux is watching her own future unfold:

“She was lying in bed motionless. Her eyes were sunken, and red around the edges. I undressed her to change her clothes. Her body was white and flaccid. Afterwards I cried. Because of time passing. And because the body which I see is also mine.”

“For me she is the personification of time. She is also pushing me towards death.”

“This morning I read an article on motherhood and infertility in the newspaper Le Monde. The maternal instinct is tantamount to a death wish.”

It is to the elderly women of the hospital that Ernaux is most drawn. When she observes her mother’s roommate stuck in a mental loop, making and unmaking the bed, she writes simply, “Women.” She notes a, “sense of identification,” with her mother, there being “no true distance between us.” Their bond stretches beyond genetics and personality, into the domestic expectations placed on women themselves — expectations that linger disquietingly in the subtext. For Ernaux (and so many other women in this situation), hospitalising her mother involves a tortured end to her duties as a carer:

“For the first time, I have a clear picture of what her life must be like in this place, in between my visits: the meals in the dining room, the waiting. I am accumulating tonnes of guilt for the future. But letting her stay at my place would have meant the end of my life.”

So much of this feels familiar to me — the guilt, the pain, the slow sliding away, the inevitability of time, the regret.

“I had all that time to get closer to her and I didn’t make the most of it.”

And yet my lasting impression is one of love:

“As I bend forward to check the safety catch of my mother’s wheelchair, she leans over and kisses my hair. How can I survive that kiss, such love, my mother, my mother.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing this August. Let me know in the comments.

Found Material

Discussion about this post