Sorry, We Missed You (Ken Loach, UK, 2019)

Ken Loach is probably the last marxist filmmaker in the Western hemisphere, and that makes him probably one of the last practicioners of the social realist style. Loach may be considered as the contemporary cinematographic equivalent of the nineteenth century 'social realist' novelist and serial writer Eugène Sue (1804-1857), author of, among other works, Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), in which he described and denounced the miserable living conditions of the lower classes in Paris. In their booklet The Holy Family (1844),  Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' criticized Eugene Sue for turning his characters into caricatures and unfortunately, this criticism also applies to Loach's SORRY, WE MISSED YOU (UK, 2019). Loach characters are stereotypes that seem to be drawn from the vast literature on the working conditions of what Guy Standing called The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

For those viewers who missed or skipped the vast body of publications and TV reports on the 'gig' economy - of which Uber is the best known example - the delivery depot boss of , Maloney (Ross Brewster), provides the spectator in a job interview with the main character Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen), a crash course in the brave new world of the post-industrial and service oriented economy. In this new economy, workers do not 'work for' but 'work with' a firm, and they don't 'work' but they 'perform a service'. They do not get a salary or wages, but 'fees'. The firm does not employ them, but they are self-employed entrepreneurs who are 'masters of their own destiny' and 'make their own choices'. And, as self-employed entrepreneurs, workers in gig economy firms are not colleagues who can be united in a common cause, but rather competitors who vie for the best assignments, put their own particular interests first, and are not prepared to help one of their co-workers out when he or she is in trouble unless they get an appropriate fee for that, as Ricky soon finds out on the work floor of PDF.

And, as Maloney explains, the heart that makes the firm tick is a mobile digital scanner which plans their routes, tracks their movements, and monitors their breaks (after two minutes of a break it starts beeping). The name of the firm PDF, then, not only stands for Parcels Delivered Fast, but also hints towards the digital technologies that made the rise of the gig economy possible in the first place. Without mobile phones, digital scanners, GPS technology, RFID sensors and what have you 'platforms' like Uber, Deliveroo and fill in your own favorite example, would never have come into existence, and, as has been extensively discussed in the literature on the gig economy, these digital 'surveillance and control' devices have also introduced new practices and technologies of Taylorist discipline.

In line with the neo-liberal ideology that underlies the new gig economy, a job is no longer a set of tasks a worker performs in an agreed upon number of working hours in exchange for a wage, but an opportunity for the self-employed entrepreneur to invest in a bright future in which he or she can start their own firm, or rather, their own 'franchise'. And indeed, in order to be able to start working 'with' PDF, Ricky has to make an investment and buy a van and since he is already debt ridden he has to convince his wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) that she will have to sell her car. As Ricky will find out in the remainder of the film, this investment and the investment of his own work will not yield the promised returns, but the whole system of fees, fines and compensations that constitutes the gig econmy - damage or loss of equipment, packages, or missed working days have to be paid for or compensated by the 'self-employed entrepreneurs' themselves - operates to the effect that the more work one 'invests' in the job, the greater the debts the gig entrepreneur incurs. And, as it should be in a social realist drama, Ricky is the (stereo-)typical character whom all the negative features of the gig economy befall.

Through Abby, who Ricky persuades to sell her car with promisses of a better future, Ricky's family  enters the scene. Not only is Ricky's family a prototypical, indeed 'ideal' nuclear family with a father , mother and a sun and a younger daughter, but this 'Holy Family' also stands for the new working class that no longer works in manufactories and industries, but in what is called the 'service industry'. Whereas Rick works for a private, commercial economy, though, Abby works for what is supposed to be a public service: she is a care-worker who works for a care agency, and since public services have been devolved to the private sector, it comes as no surprise that the working conditions Abby has to deal with are not that much different from those Ricky is up to. Abby, too, has targets to meet, her visits to her patients are too short to provide more than the necessary care, and she must always be available through her mobile phone in case emergencies emerge.

All the effects of work in the new economy on the private lifes of workers in the service industries that are quite familiar from the relevant literature, fall upon Rick and Abby: long working hours (fourteen to sixteen hours a day), no time for a proper private life, and, of course no time for paying proper attention to the needs of their children. And for those spectators who are not yet fully aware of the miserable situation Rick and Abby find themselves Loach drives these points home by letting Ricky and Abby converse in their spare moments together in dialogues that  sound like quotes from manifestos on the conditions of the precariat class.

It will come as no surprise that under these circumstances this 'holy family'  will come under pressure and under the threat of falling apart. And given the rather schematic and stereotypical rendering in this film of the working and living conditions of the precariat it will not come as surprise either that the fault lines in this family develop along quite predictable (and Freudian) lines: Ricky and Aby sun Seb (Rhys Stone) rather spends time painting graffitis on walls than attending school, gets suspended and is eventually arrested for a petty crime (the theft of a couple of paint cans), which costs Ricky a lot of money because he has to take leave of his work in order to attend the interview of his son at the police station and was not able to find a replacement, thus incursing even greater debts. Eventually Seb drives his father so mad that he hits him, which, of course reminds Abby of her own father who in good proletarian tradition beat her up when he was drunk. None of cliches of the working and lower class miseries are spared. And, as it should, it is the female part of the household that tries to keep the family together and to rain in the mutual anger between Ricky and Seb. This image of the nuclear family is not only quite stereotypical, but almost ancient and archetypical. Could it be that Loach is mostly interested in the lower class because it is a social repository of rather traditional values of honest labour, the family as the cornerstone of social cohesion and women as the ultimate care-takers? The division of social labour inside this film's family seem to suggest as much.

And since Ricky is the stereotypical representative of the precariat, he has to have all possible mishaps and misfortunes coming on him, so he indeed gets assaulted and robbed by couple of thugs who, in passing not only molest him but also destroy his precious scanner. On top of the day off he has to spend in hospital, he receives a phone call while waiting in that hospital - an opportunity for Loach to offer a peek into the rather dreadful state British health care for the lower segments of society is in - in which Maloney tells him that he for the stolen passports and the destroyed scanner he will have to pay no less than 1500 pounds. Although Ricky's mishap brings the family together again, Ricky, desparate as he is, takes no time to convalesce and against his family that tries to stop him he drives away in his van, half-blinded towards a future where there seems to be no light at the horizon.

There are just a few features from the literature on the gig economy and the precariat that are missing in this film. According to that literature, the long working hours, scarce payments and uncertain futures cause disproportianate alcohol and drugs abuse among the precariat. Not so in Loach's holy family that, in the best traditions of social realism, is, of course, a well intending, decent and (over) responsible small community onto whom the outside world in general and the gig and service economie in particular inflict the worst plagues the precariat can happen. But this yields melodrama from the classical Hollywood sort, or, even worse, socialist realism of the sort practiced in the first decades of the twentieth century, rather than a convincing picture of contemporary family life.

It is tempting to step into the footsteps of Marx and Engels and criticize Loach for not offering any perspective on a way out of the misery of the precariat. This, however, would be asking too much, since not a single coherent political answer has been provided from the left to the socially, economically and cuturally rather devastating effects of the neoliberal post-industrial economy which is quite a different beast from the rising industrial and capitalist society of Marx' days. Raising awareness of the appalling conditions under which a large part of the precariat works and lives might be a first step towards finding an appropriate response to the current social and economic system, and that is certainly what this film succeeds in doing. But it is precisely this zeal to promulgate the fate of the precariat, that makes this film into an illustrated manifesto that presents the spectator with talking and moving pamflets rather than convincing characters. And, as manifesto's usually do, it aims at an immediate, emotion driven outrage on the part of the spectators rather than inviting a more reflexive analysis of the events on screen.

And, maybe more disconcerting, and as is more often the case in social realism of the socialist or Marxist sort, and as already suggested above, one cannot entirely get rid of the impression that the film is plea for the restoration of classical values of labour and family as they were honored and abided in the post-war, social-democratic wellfare state. But economically as well as culturally the welfare state seems to have been for ever relegated to the past. Or did we miss something?