Monthly Film Bulletin

Pregnant and married at eighteen, Joy is dissatisfied with life with baby Jonny and husband Tom, a small-time thief whose treatment of her is violent and insensitive. A successful robbery enables them to move from their squalid bed-sitter to a semi-detached in Ruislip, but their prosperity is short-lived. Tom is jailed for four years after attempting a big robbery, and Joy briefly shares a room with her Aunt Emm, an ageing tart, before moving in with Dave, one of Tom's former associates. Dave is tender and understanding in his treatment of Jonny and Joy, but the idyll is punctured when Dave gets twelve years for robbery with violence. Intending to be faithful, Joy writes to him constantly; she moves back with Aunt Emm and initiates divorce proceedings against Tom. Then she takes a job as a barmaid, starts modelling for a seedy photographers' club and drifts into promiscuity. But when Tom is released, Joy agrees to go back to him for Jonny's sake. One evening, after Tom has beaten her up, she runs out of their flat and returns to discover that Jonny is missing. After a frantic search, she finds him on a demolition site in a derelict house. Realising how much the child means to her, she accepts the necessity of compromise and of staying with Tom but continues to dream of a distant future with Dave.

The principal characters in Poor Cow all cheerfully accept mendacity, theft, brutality and promiscuity as essential parts of a make-shift survival kit; and perhaps in defence of their unreflecting amorality, the song which is heard over the credits exhorts "Be not too hard/For life is short/And nothing is given to man". It is an exhortation which is at any rate superfluous as far as the film's makers are concerned. For neither scriptwriter Nell Dunn (Up The Junction) nor television director Kenneth Loach (Up The Junction and Cathy Come Home) could be accused of anything but indulgence (or self-indulgence) in their treatment of the subject matter in Poor Cow.

Despite the aggressive realism of the pre-credits sequence in which a placenta-covered baby emerges screaming from the womb, despite the social criticism implicit in the slum interiors and in the shots of identical rows of surburban houses, and despite the working-class authenticity of the dialogue, Loach's direction - like Brian Probyn's Eastman Colour photography - suffuses the material in a cheery glow of lyricism that often verges on sentimentality. The sequence in which Aunt Emm grotesquely glues on a false eyelash before going out to make a pick-up, like the pub scene in which a toothless sexagenarian arranges an adulterous tryst with a wrinkled contemporary, is treated as lacking in squalor, as being somehow quaint. Though this testimony to the ubiquitous survival of the mating instinct may contain echoes of Zola, it is Zola in a Pop wrapper (a trendy song by Christopher Logue, music by Donovan, sex and violence to the accompaniment of Radio Caroline).

Borrowing techniques in equal parts from television and Godard, Loach in his first feature film creates a style that is an incongruous mixture of realism and romanticism (while Joy earthily recalls "having it" with Dave on the top of a waterfall, the image of the lovers kissing under the cascade seems to come straight from a fairy-tale). Similarly, Loach demands of his actors an odd mixture of improvisation and contrivance, successful in the cases of John Bindon and Queenie Watts, but uncomfortable in Terence Stamp's generally sensitive performance as Dave. And the narrative moves from the subjective (Joy's monologues) to the objective (conversations with an unseen interviewer, cinéma-vérité style) to the cynically detached (sub-Brechtian titles, "...the world was our oyster and we chose Ruislip"). Not even Carol White as Joy, glowing with vitality and beautifully modulating the heroine's different moods, can make of Poor Cow more than a superficial, slightly patronising incursion into the nether realms of social realism.