Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Ken Loach's Poor Cow is showing on MUBI starting January 9, 2021 in the United Kingdom in the series First Films First.
An aesthetic of Swinging London is established only to have its seams split in Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s first feature film from 1967. Donovan’s melancholic soundtrack is spiked with bright British Invasion b-sides, London’s industrial neighborhoods filmed in pop-art palettes, and Joy, played by Carol White, is lucent blonde with a fringe and bouffant. Halfway into the film, dressed in a mod-print floral housecoat, Joy finds her bouffant hair-piece destroyed, unhelpfully washed by her toddler as she overslept. The deflated hair-piece which Joy despairingly “can’t go out without!” and cost her “five and eleven” demarks Joy’s status in the narrative; a single, working-class mother with no way to get by but her looks. It is a scene literal yet beguiling. This ornamental hair-piece, abstract and banal, is the coveted commodity yet also embodies the source of Joy’s income. In its abject state the promises of this object—the ability to pay rent and buy food, the dreamworld of another life, the valuation of her gender, the possibility of beauty—are untenable, unstable, and lacking. Alternating expressions of need and desire are reiterated throughout the film. Making a date, a future lover flirts, “I’ll be round first thing in the morning with some nice hot rolls, how’s that?” “Bring some butter as well because I ain’t got any butter.” “You haven’t got any butter… is there anything else that you want?” Against a backdrop of ‘60s cultural innovation and simmering second-wave feminism, Poor Cow portrays a persistent prosaic reality of working-class women, rearticulating that beautiful suffragette-cum-labor rights slogan “We want bread, but we want roses too.” Joy’s housecoat is printed with flowers—in this color-saturated film, her flowers are graphically black and white.
What Poor Cow names, it shirks, and through the film’s formal and narrative experimentation, a striking enunciation of female agency develops. The title, keenly implicating Joy’s class, gender, and function (vis-a-vis livestock) as a reproducing and exchangeable body, is soon upstaged by Joy naming herself in voiceover monologue: “My name is Joy. I’m about 5’3, measurements 36-24-36, and English. My little baby’s name is Jonny...Things I like most: plenty of clothes, and money.” A scene of childbirth opens the film, cutting between Joy’s labouring face and the infant emerging from her body. Even prior to the title sequence, Joy is conspicuously established as that female body mutually essential to classical Hollywood film and western capitalism—the locus for male desire and site of exploited, unpaid reproduction of the labor force.
In this first scene, the unflinching lens on a real birth employs a visual language of verite-shock that Loach had begun to develop to iconoclastic effect in his previous BBC social dramas. Here, in living color, the ecstatic saturation of the image decamps from the neorealist black and white of his television work. The primordial trope of birth announces Loach’s first feature film; corporeal (re)production transcribes as “body of work.” Adapted from Nell Dunn’s provocative first novel published the same year, Poor Cow also gives birth in its protagonist to a new female subject. Dunn and Loach previously collaborated on Up the Junction (1965) for the BBC’s series The Wednesday Play. This censorship-flouting “television play” candidly portrayed backstreet abortion and marked an inventive shift for Loach. Appropriating New Wave editing, narrative and camera techniques, and incorporating documentary footage, his “play” regenerated onto film. In step with the political, social and cultural (and counter-cultural) revolutions teeming in London, the collaborators pursued their biting social realist project in Poor Cow. Dunn and Loach sought to degloss an impoverished urban environment particularly harsh towards women, and present a radical figure in Joy. Talking back and unabashedly expressing desire, Joy acts out towards immoveable bondages of both her gender and social determination.
The ostensible love-triangle plot is eviscerated in the film by means of what Loach calls “mosaics of little complimentary scenes.” The film follows Joy through impressionist vignettes of everyday life—meandering strolls, jobs performed with eye-rolls, solitary coffees in cafes, switching-up of cramped flats, switching-up of louse men, urban seaside reflection, cooking and laundering. The poetic, formless narrative unleashes Joy as the functional object of plot-driven action. Home from the hospital, Joy chides her husband Tom (John Bindon) for his failure to appear at the birth of their son. This characterizes her husband’s self-involved sliminess, but his pointed absence also allows the suggestive reading of birth as production of female agency. The triangular relationship between Joy, Tom and her lover Dave (Terence Stamp) is a composition disordered by both men’s incarceration during most of the film. Locked up and offscreen, the absent men are agents bereft, impotent, with muted voices. Their confinement contrasts bluntly with Joy’s freedom of movement within both the narrative framework and the physical frames of the film.
Unhinged from plot and unbound by domestic walls, Joy is portrayed as a body-in-motion. Routine vagrancy literalizes Joy’s transience. Scenes framed through long or aerial shots trace Joy through landscapes of London’s working-class localities, mapping multidimensional industrial, commercial and residential geometries around her. The camerawork is unobtrusive and democratic; post-war urban landscapes loom as character rather than backdrop. The scale of Joy’s figure within the expansive environment visually suggests the painterly German Romantic, employing an urban and feminist update on the conceptual union of spirit and nature. The reckoning of Joy’s body within the social landscape posits a radical opening up of female interiority. Accompanied by Joy’s voiceover of introspective monologue and epistle, or by redemptive hymns by Donovan, these scenes construct durational, contemplative spaces. After Dave is sentenced to prison, Donovan’s title track plays as an aerial view follows Joy and Jonny traversing a grim residential courtyard. The distant camera permits Joy space for her grief and contemplation while portraying her untethered, on the go, plotting her next move. The bleak, littered courtyard from birds-eye-view is dotted with colorful hanging laundry. Donovan’s lyrics, modified from his original version for the film (the song title changed from Poor Love to Poor Cow), serve an illustrative function per Joy’s experience: “Off to the wasteground you must go/Bring me one fine posie/All of a sudden I’m light as air/I’m as sad as a butterfly/Oh I dwell with my pride and my songs and things/Wearily, wearily.” Joy has lost her lover, acquired a job as a barmaid, packed up and is again crashing in the squalid flat of her Aunt Emm. Yet the subdued sublimity of the scene reiterates the lyrics of the title track, intimating that despite her futile struggles, Joy has her song.
In a speech on the conditions of working women, American suffragette Helen Todd defined life’s Bread as “home, shelter and security” and the Roses of life “music, education, nature and books.” Todd identified woman's “voice” as the crucial expression for the want of bread and roses too. Joy, while allotted no place of her own in Poor Cow, is provided multiple manifestations of voice. Through diegetic dialogue, voiceover monologue, written letter, interview-address and lyrical chapter cards, Joy muses on the pedestrian and philosophical, expressing both frivolous desires and analyzing meanings of life. Joy is positioned as a thinking agent, a philosopher subject. Vocalizing need and want— “Do you know what I’d really like, a nice flat in Chelsea- have you got any?” “If only I had a car, I’d drive off and find a place where there’re only men and a few glamour girls, and flashy cars and big hotels” “Do you know what I want, a bodystocking”— Joy’s pronouncements invoke Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay on banality: “Banalities connect the author with the world around him. They connect the extreme and the whimsical with the common life.” Poor Cow constructs female interiority through Joy’s physical transience and also in an onslaught of expression. Late in the film, battered by Tom, Joy roams protractedly through austere concrete parks, commercial streets, past a backdrop of smoking factories and brutalist playgrounds. There can be no redemption for physical abuse (or its representation) but Joy’s extended voiceover—articulations of her limitations, an expression of escape, the desire for a more beautiful life—constructs an agency typically barred from filmic narratives of female abuse. Amplifying the voice of one not allowed to be heard, Poor Cow recharges the victim as a subject.
The promiscuity of enunciative forms enacts Joy’s articulations of desire and allies with her physical promiscuity within the narrative. Tom and Dave imprisoned, Joy indulges flirtations and flings with a flock of vague and interchangeable lovers. Her trysts commence from an urge towards pleasure rather than financial or material dependence and are treated in the film with the same impassive impressionism of other day-to-day vignettes. One chapter card declares: “I need different men to satisfy my different moods.” At a park table smoking and gossiping uninhibitedly about men, Joy admits to her chum Beryl, “I see some fellow in the bar, and he catches my eye and I get this funny little throb in my stomach...that’s before he’s even touched me, mind you...accidentally he might brush my arm or something like that. Then I have at him!” Various expressions of desire bear equal charge, whether material, philosophical, or sexual: in conference with a divorce lawyer Joy opines love and happiness as the sole meaningful aspirations, declares her fancy for nice clothes, and coquettishly inquires as to the lawyer’s relationship status. At the end of the film in a peculiar Brechtian-style interview, she probes desire in meta-analysis, “I say, Oh, I want this and I want that, but when you come down to it I don’t think there is a perfect life, really, you’ve just gotta make do with what you’ve got, and be happy.”
Interviewed at the time of the release of the novel and film, Nell Dunn explained, “She loved the men, she loved whoever she was with. It didn’t really matter that she did go change from man to man because each one she really loved.” Accused of promoting promiscuity Dunn continued, “In a way I believe in promiscuity, because it is a way of only looking for somebody to fall permanently in love with.” The unapologetic fact of Joy’s sexual promiscuity in the film subverts Luce Irigaragy’s dictum that “the economy of exchange—desire—is a man’s business.” A concept of promiscuity advances a relationship between language and desire in Poor Cow. In the modern flat of a wealthier beau, Joy announces her intention to enroll in evening elocution classes. “Well I want to speak nice!”
This utterance uniting speech and desire is enticing. “I want to speak” addresses need and the right to self-determination. “To speak nice” suggests pleasurable excess. Loach views his first feature in terms of excess, stating that he would like to “take the scissors” to Poor Cow, describing it “full of mistakes, misjudgements, scenes, it’s too long, indulgent, needs a stronger spine.” Contemporary critics decried the saturated color palette, repelled by ornamentation upon the impoverished, an affront to gritty social realist aesthetics. Yet the rapturous color ignites Joy’s platinum blonde in counterpart to her monochrome roses, the “too long” opens a new possibility of female interiority, and the playful, excessive experimental linguistic devices enforce Joy’s voice. Promiscuity is rewritten in a soft filter to permit a poetic declaration of agency. Within the brutal, grey trappings of the post-war British working-class, Poor Cow produces an authorial female subject, one that shuns the binds of sex, class and narrative representation, and ventures a charged enunciation of female desire.