The Navigators

THE NAVIGATORS is another excellent Ken Loach movie.

I had been putting off watching it because I thought it would be very gruelling and upsetting. I've been a fan of Ken Loach's movies for a long time but oftentimes I am not in the mood because I know I'll either cry or get upset (or both).

THE NAVIGATORS is different than his other films. It isn't a movie where you cry and have the feeling of being emotionally raked over the coals (just saw the haunting SWEET SIXTEEN and am still having the aftershocks from that one).

Anyway, THE NAVIGATORS is a movie that you watch and get angry. For anyone working in a globalized economy (i.e., almost everyone) the ideas behind the railworker's plight -- how absolutely screwed they are -- is nothing new. Yet I can't think of a movie that has illustrated this situation more clearly. It's actually shocking that there aren't more movies about how altered our working world has became. Possibly because this is such a current experience in the world today.

THE NAVIGATORS is a saga of working men, attractive, tough, garrulous, hard-working people who just want to work hard, make money, live their lives.

I recommend the movie highly.

As always, a social issue is beautifully intertwined with personal drama: sad, funny, true like life itself. And cinema itself. It's a relief to see someone can entertain and move us in this way, that's definitely not the present-day Hollywood way. On the other hand, Loach's career is brilliant from beginning to end with the only possible exception of Carla's Song that I consider a faux-pas. Like all great artists, Loach with this films add something to our understanding of ourselves, and our present history. I supposed that you understood I liked it. Still it seems I've lost the best: the liverpuldian parley. In Italy unfortunately all these films come dubbed.

This is by no means a movie to be seen for pure entertainment,. This is a REALISTIC movie, so those looking for kicks stay away. Otherwise you will be so disappointed.

I like this movie so much, especially since is the type of movie Hollywood would NEVER make. It sharply portraits how bad working conditions have gotten over the years (which is something I have witnessed firsthand). Treating people like dirt and firing them without a reason have become an end it itself.

Watching this film takes you to the core of what's going on at most workplaces, which obviously won't delight those who think life is pretty, because it ain't. Put your feet on the ground and search for that beauty - you are not going to find it in the treatment workers are getting anywhere. This is the real world, people, whether we like it or not.

While seeing this movie, never did I feel I was in the cinema. I could relate to what the characters were going through.

Of course the movie has no happy end, but if it did would be unreal.

10/10.

I was lucky to see during the festival of Venice in Milan this very recent film from the good "social" director Ken Loach.

A group of friends in 1995 work in the Yorkshire for the ex-state owned: British Rail, which meanwhile has been completely fragmented in a tremendous number of small private companies that compete one against the other in order to be more competitive and gain the different bids. This situation leads the whole structure of each private company to a very profitable organisation offering a very poor service that has to save money from any single item of the fixed/variable costs structure of the economic statement.

Loach this time points out the lost of the social benefits of the labour class in a blackmail black and white situation where, if they want to get the job, they have to leave with these conditions which do not guarantee any type of social and physical safety to the worker.

It is not by chance that England has been the frame of several train accidents during the last years.

Unions are getting weaker and weaker and the so called "trouble makers" are led to leave the companies. The whole film is nicely viewed with some very fine, pretty uncommon in previous Loach's films, British humour. The scene where the supervisor has to read to the workers the message from the top management of productivity and their new rights is hilarious and superbly performed.

Rating: 6/10

Marvelous film set in South Yorkshire, using local actors and comedians, done not so much in a documentary style, but with a documentary feel, about a group of railroad track workers during the privatization of British Rail. The culture changing from one of unionized steady jobs, to one of freelancing with no health care or holidays and for the sake of economy, stretching security which leads to the death of one of the workers. This presumably low budget film, shot all on location, is gritty, real, and is a wonderful insight into the British working class and its humor. A real treasure.

The fact that the previous reviewer apparently had other problems on her mind at the time should not dissuade anyone from seeing this excellent example of Ken Loach's work.