Riff Raff

Ken Loach, UK, 1990, 95 minutes

In today's world of slick, big-budget Hollywood movies full of glamorous Americans it's refeshing to see a British (naturally) film that tells of life as it really is. Riff Raff is the story of Stevie (Robert Carlyle), a young Scotsman just out of Barlinnie working on a London building site alongside other itinerant workers. In a rather improbable situation, he meets Susan, a would-be singer who is equally down on her luck.

The film explores the real truths of life at the lower end, a society which rarely gets exposure in the arts. While much of Britain in the eighties, especially the London area, was enjoying a boom, people such as these builders, drawn from less prosperous areas, formed part of a growing underclass. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the luxury flats that Stevie and his colleagues are working on; flats which they could never afford themselves, living instead in squalor. Less subtle are the socialist sermons delivered by one of the workers during his tea-break.

Riff Raff, in common with many British films, has a definite low-budget feel to it (it was shot in only five weeks) and, it could be argued, has little cinematic merit. But it gives a voice to a whole class of people that get scant representation in the world and deserve to be seen.

Review by Catherine Thompson
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93