Riff-Raff – 1990 | 95mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Winner of the Felix award for Best European Film in 1992, Riff-Raff marked the end of Ken Loach’s period of near obscurity.

A then-unknown Robert Carlyle plays Stevie, a Glaswegian labourer fresh out of Barlinnie prison and newly arrived in London he gets a job on a building site. Here he has to contend with Mick (Garrie J. Lammin) the bossy foreman trying – but usually failing to control his workers as they duck and dive the rules and regulations of the building trade. The other workers, including Larry (Ricky Tomlinson), rally round to find him a squat, and soon he gets a girlfriend too – Susan (Emer McCourt), an aspiring singer with little talent. It’s easy to see why the film was so warmly received. Loach’s defining theme, the class struggle, is central of course, but there’s no didacticism – Larry’s denunciations of Thatcherism are greeted with much leg-pulling by his friends, and a balance between humour and heartbreak is effortlessly struck. Murky sound quality aside, this is wonderful, humanist film-making.