REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN
Liam
Directed by Stephen Frears
Screenplay by Jimmy McGovern
Starring Anthony Borrows, Megan Burns, Ian Hart and Claire Hackett
Showing at Dendy and Palace cinemas nationally
Liam, the latest film scripted by Jimmy McGovern, centres on a family of five. Liam, the youngest, has a loving mother, his father is a responsible bread-winner and a kind and loving older brother and sister. Times are hard but Liam's family is a happy one. Dad feels confident about the future because his job is secure. Until he loses it.
Set in the Irish Catholic quarter of Liverpool, Liam is a child's eye view of one family's free-fall into poverty during the depression era, rich with humanity, despair and humour.
Liam's proud father, laid off from the docks, refuses to accept charity from the Catholic church despite having paid into the church fund for years. The film charts his increasingly harrowing attempts to find work.
Dad undergoes a transformation during the film. From a stern but fair family man, he becomes a resentful lay-about, and finally, a raving lunatic. He denounces Irish friends, yelling at them to get out of his country. He condemns Jewish shop keepers and landlords, and is eventually recruited to Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts. His son turns against him, favouring the socialists, but aside from these few brief moments, the political discussions of the period don't feature much in the film.
To bring in some extra money, Liam's older sister Teresa starts work cleaning for the Abernathys, a wealthy, cultured Jewish household. She finds herself enjoying the atmosphere of comfort and culture, but is wracked with guilt after admitting in confession that she wished Mrs Abernathy was her mother.
Sin and shame are at the heart of this film. There is a certain humour mixed with the horror you feel watching seven-year-old children subjected to terrifying accounts of hell and eternal damnation each day at school.
Liam, an earnest seven-year-old with a terrible stammer, inadvertently opens the door on his mother while she is bathing. Throughout the film, Liam is consumed with anxiety that his mother's pubic hair makes her different from the "real" women he has seen in pictures.
McGovern recounts the inspiration for this thread of the film. "When I was Liam's age, I walked into the back kitchen and saw my mother naked. I saw, too, her pubic hair and for months after that I thought my mother was deformed."
In preparation for the boys' first confession and communion, Liam's fiercely authoritarian schoolteacher relishes in striking the fear of God into their hearts. With flashing eyes she explains that the clean, white souls they had when they were born have become blackened and filthy with dirt, because they have sinned. She tells them that they must confess every sin at their first confession, and if they don't, they commit the biggest sin of all.
Liam ponders over whether or not his curiosity is a sin. He asks his teacher how you know if a sin is a sin, to which she answers, "if it preys on your mind, it's a sin". Eventually he blurts it out in confession, and the priest assures him that all women have pubic hair. His relief is enormous.
Liam is a dark yet sensitive and sympathetic exploration of the difficulty of working class life compounded by religious authoritarianism in a period of economic downturn — a film worth seeing.