Taglines: A story of real people and feelings. Without make-up.
Family Life movie storyline. A young woman, Janice (Sandy Ratcliff), is living with her restrictive and conservative parents, who lead a dull working-class life, and consider their daughter to be “misbehaving” whenever she’s trying to find her own way in life. When she becomes pregnant, they force her into abortion, and hypocritically blame her for “upsetting them” when she is unable cope with the emotional and mental effect this has on her.
The film is depressing and excruciatingly painful and hard to watch, as Janice is subjected to brain-washing and reproach by her parents and shockingly self-righteous and ignorant doctors (could this have been only 25 years ago???). A masterpiece, a stark and painful portrait of a hypocritical society.
Family Life (US: Wednesday’s Child) is a 1971 British drama film directed by Ken Loach from a screenplay by David Mercer. It is a remake of In Two Minds, an episode of the BBC’s Wednesday Play series first transmitted by the BBC in March 1967, which was also written by Mercer and directed by Loach. Half the budget was provided by the National Film Finance Corporation the other half by Nat Cohen and Anglo-EMI. The film was screened at the New York Film Festival on October 3, 1972.
film Review for family Life
Janice gets pregnant and she wants to have the baby, but her parents tell her that they know best, and so Janice has an abortion instead. Janice likes a fellow, but he hates the Establish ment and drives around at night on a noisy motorbike, and so her parents decide: exit the boyfriend and enter Janice—into a hospital for mental patients. Janice is a voluntary patient, and, think ing that means something, she walks out one day. But her parents, having done all they can, throw in the sponge and sign the papers that will forci bly commit Janice, I should imagine, for life.
Janice is the central fig ure in Ken Loach’s “Wed nesday’s Child,” a film that was called “Family Life” in England, where it was made, and that is about family life in all kinds of terrifying ways. “Bloody training camps,” are what Tim, the boyfriend, calls families. And as he gazes out on row after row of identical middle‐class houses, he says, “That’s normal … but is it sane?” Well, in one sense, I suppose it is sane, if only because it is on the outside, part of the world, rather than on the inside—where Janice goes, to endure what not even the most blindly charitable could call psychiatric care.
Family Life (1971)
Directed by: Ken Loach
Starring: Sandy Ratcliff, Bill Dean, Grace Cave, Malcolm Tierney, Hilary Martin, Michael Riddall, Alan MacNaughtan, Johnny Gee, Bernard Atha, Freddie Clemson, Alec Coleman, Jack Connell
Screenplay by: David Mercer
Production Design by: Keith Evans
Cinematography by: Charles Stewart
Film Editing by: Roy Watts
Costume Design by: Daphne Dare
Art Direction by: William McCrow
Music by: Marc Wilkinson
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: MGM – EMI (UK theatrical), Cinema 5 Distributing (US theatrical)
Release Date: December 2, 1971 (UK), October 5, 1972 (USA)
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