FILM REVIEW PLEASE THAT

The issues raised in 'Family Life' directed by Ken Loach, written by David Mercer and produced by Tony Garnett are important.

The story of an unhappy and uncertain girl, who is incapable of breaking through the oppresSiON of her family, who is torn by the contradiction of what she wants and what her parents think is right, who is defeated in this struggle and retreats into madness as the only way of resolving the contradiction, is a powerful one.

Janice, the desperate heroine of the picture, comes from what could be described as a normal suburban home. He father is a reliable, dependable worker, depressed defeated man who lost all fight years ago.

Her mother, one of those domineering women, repressed, assertive, as if motherhood itself confers upon her some kind of divine very enters mily.

The very contours their experience are confined by deadening conformity to what is They arehe as it were, embalmec considered correct and proper within bourgeois ments of matrimony and respectability.

The authority that they wield over their daughter serves almost as a bulwark to fend off the sheer monotony of their lives. They are victims of prudery and puritanism. When Janice gets her parentspregnant the fuel of outrage is fired. It is mother 'who knows insists on the is abortion that best' and it mother who sends Janice headlong into acute depression.

At no point do her parents concede to her an independent life or feelings or wishes.

When she argues back, asserts herself, this is treated merely as an example of her wilfulness, her sluttishness, her disobedience and finally her 'illness'. There must be something wrong with her and the GP recommends her to a psychiatrist.

In the terrible and arbitrary lottery that is Britain's national health service, Tanice is fortunate to be sent to an 'experimental' wing of a mental hospital, run by a young psychiatrist.

There she tells the doctor, "l don't feel there's "me" to choose for when comes to making a big decision'.

The treatment takes the form of informal therapy sessions where the patients openly discuss their problems and predicaments. It's a therapeutic community.

effective never because management comof the hospital decide to animed close down the wing. Janice is now given the orthodox treatment currently practised in our mental hospitals.

and frightened she is sedated and given what must be the most barbarous of inventions, electro-convulsive, therapy.

Electrodes are connected to her head and literally she is given an electric shock. Though un- conscious, Once the body contorts in spasms. over, she is wheeled on a trolley and placed by the side of the 30 or so other patients, unconscious from the same treatment.

Made well in this war, she is released from hospital allowed home on a course tranquillizing drugs. She re-enters very environment that is destroying her, and in no time the familiar arguments and demands are made on her.

Her course is then set on a down-hill path. She attacks her parents with a knife and is readmitted to hospital.

There she strikes up a relationship with a young male patient and is 'advised to smash up the ward.

The one relationship that she has throughout the film is with a young art student, who tries to reassure her, tell her that life does not have to be the drab conformity of the suburbs, that she must learn to fight back. It is the art student who persuades her to leave the hospital and to come with him.

In what is one of the most horrifying scenes in the film the hospital authorities break into his flat, like the flying squad, and wrench Janice away from him, back to the mental home.

They are an arm of the state.

Now like a vegetable Janice is wheeled out before an audience of medical students as an exhibit of schizophrenia.

As if talking about a machine, the lecturer points to her mechanical faults.

What the film concretely explores is the nature of capitalist oppression through its ideology and morality.

The family, as a nuclear social unit embodies and expresses the requirements and contradictions of the system.

Behind bourgeois concepts of madness lie the authoritarianism of the state and its demands of a conformist behaviour.

Anti-social behaviour is therefore defined mad. The questions raised in the film go beyond, therefore, the purely reformist demands of a more humane treatment for mental patients. The issues are political and David Mercer's script reflects very much the work of psychiatrists : R. D. Laing, David into their theories and relate them to their subsequent development.

The patient went 'mad", they said, because unconsciously they were made a 'scapegoat' to preserve the 'sanity' of the rest of the family.

The 'mad one' was trapped in a series of contradictions or 'double binds' and was incapable of discovering his own autonomy or self. The patient himself becomes this contradiction, and splits himself and takes on another role to conceal himself.

It is a process of hiding the 'self' which is considered to be that bad or rebellious element at odds with the good; i.e., the requirements of the family or society at large. Tony Gamett, producer Laing perceptively noticed that schizophrenics, according to their families, started off life as 'good' became 'bad' and then went 'mad'.

The orthodox treatment that they receive in institutions takes the form of punishment or cutting out the bad. The hospital reproduces the authoritarianism and oppression of the home situation in a more barbaric form.

As Esterson said on television the other night, most mental hospitals perform the same function as the police.

The importance of Laing's and the others' work cannot be underestimated. They set out to find the relationship between the oppression of society and the way that it is internalized by the 'schizophrenic'.

They rejected all theories of genetic disease. They saw it therefore as a social and political relationship. They set out to establish connection between Marx and Freud.

Stalinist thinking has dominated this question for years, rejecting Freud and theories of ›gychiatrist R. D. Laing the unconscious, it substitutes a purely mechanical and determinist conception of personality, leaving out precisely a dialectical understanding.

It is no accident that the forms of treatment in the Soviet Union are the same kind of mechanistic 'solution' as used in our hospitals.

Neither is it an accident that political dissidents and oppositionists are designated 'mad'.

The unconscious is the repository of the material experiences of the world. It stands in a dialectical relationship to the conscious.

The process of analysis advocated by Freud is the uncovering of these earlier unconscious experiences that imprison, as it were, the patient in responses, actions and fears that are no longer appropriate to his contemporary situation. It is a dialectical and materialist process.

What Laing leaves out of his thinking is the living reality of the class struggle itself. He only concentrates on the oppression of capitalism, but like the aptopian socialists, he can find no way through into socialism. He takes only one opposite. Such a blind alley has led him, through an insistence on subjectivism and spontaneity, into all kinds of metaphysical theories of drugs, madness and mysticism.

That the so-called mad are victims of capitalist oppression, that they embody sharply the social, political and psychological contradictions of oppression only the negative side of the • The resolution of the contradiction is not found in Laing's later theories, where he advocates the discovery of self through the healing process of madness itself — the subjective trip.

No. The real resolution is found in the ultimately determining battle of the classes and the victory of the socialist revolution. That is the key question.

Without this understanding there is only floundering on the wilder shores of idealism.

Such a contradiction is neither really resolved in the film in my view and explains some of the tension or uncertainty in its presentation.

For instance the scene where Janice sprays her father's garden with blue paint, has more than a hint of the glorification 'doing your thing', and certainly the father's remark, 'what has she done to my gnomes' is the juxtaposing of musical-hall gag and hippy, teenage rebellion, which underscores this weakness.

Nevertheless 'Family Life' is a great step forward in British film making. It is shot in a calm, unfussy way and has some acting performances from Sandy Ratcliff, Bill Dean, Grace Cave and Malcolm Tierney which are really remarkable.

In a barren desert of, for the most part, dull and contentless film production, "Family Life' confirms the Kestrel team as the most politically and socially conscious film makers in the country.

It is a film missed.

Thursday