_Ladybird, Ladybird_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Ken Loach's starkly moving film opens at a small, smoky karaoke bar in London, where Maggie (Crissy Rock) sings on stage, her entire body caught up in her passionate performance. Jorge (Vladimir Vega) watches her, rapt, and when she sits down, he approaches, cautiously, politely. She drinks and laughs, teases and flirts. And then she goes home with him, where she breaks down and tries to leave in a hurry, eventually telling him the awful story of her life until then. Through flashbacks, her story emerges gradually, including her escape from an abusive relationship and the loss of her four children (by four different fathers) to Social Services. And this is only the beginning. The karaoke performance is a fitting introduction, as it alludes obliquely to the prescriptive molds that any one of us is expected to follow. Maggie's predicament is specifically harsh, though, as the movie reveals. Based on a true story (and originally conceived as a documentary, until legal logistics became too unwieldy), it follows her and Jorge's developing romance and hard-won commitment to one another, as they confront an endless series of administrative and interpersonal hurdles. First they try to regain custody of Maggie's young children, and then to have their own family, but Social Services seems perversely determined to thwart them, seizing one baby at the hospital immediately after she gives birth. That the welfare workers are only trying to "do their job'' begins to seem like a sad, incomprehensible, and eventually absurdist refrain, as the rules of the job are more and more removed from lived conditions. _Ladybird, Ladybird_, which takes its title from a traditional nursery rhyme ("Fly away home, your house is on fire, your kids are all gone''), continually redirects your attention from the workings of the system to its effects. Watching Maggie's tale unfold is a singular and often visceral experience; there are moments when it makes you flinch, others when it makes you gasp. Loach's work is always pointedly political; this film explores the seemingly implacable bureaucracy that attempts to regulate domestic abuse, as it is incarnated by well-meaning social workers and grim-faced policemen determined to follow their on- paper directives, but unable to see the damage they're doing. "Maggie's case,'' says writer Rona Munro of her first produced screenplay, "is extreme but not unique. It seems that women who are victims of violence and poverty are condemned for inflicting these conditions on their children instead of receiving any effective support, any real choice. '' Maggie's sense of powerlessness and limited options is evoked through handheld-camerawork and grainy filmstock: the world seen through her eyes is a strange and malevolent place, organized only by betrayals and abuses. Her resilience and resourcefulness take shape in Rock's uncommonly raw performance (for which the stand-up comedian and first time actor won the Best Actress Award at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival). Her Maggie is an imperfect, intensely devoted mother, an angry, distrustful and exhuberant partner, desperate to love and be loved but literally without any place to be. One flashback shows her return to an early lover, Simon (Ray Winstone, who starred in Alan Clark's _Scum_), after a brief and disheartening visit to a welfare group house, where the kids are running wild and the women are without hope. Unable to find work, she can't see what else to do. It's a dreadful decision, she knows it and you know it, but it's also the only one she can imagine. When Simon savagely beats her a short time later, it's excruciating to watch: her children cry as he takes a beer bottle to her head, and she recoils on the floor, just hoping to survive it. It's easy to understand why Jorge, an poet and exile from Paraguay (where he was jailed for political activities), seems a kind of answer to her needs: he's tenacious, naive, and generous, though continually baffled by the rules to be followed, forms to be filled out, and court hearings to be endured, in order to keep a family together. Because he lacks work papers, he takes a low-paying job at a lousy fast food joint to support his child with Maggie; but it's not long before the government tries to deport him, once again making it impossible for the couple to maintain any semblance of the domestic order that the government itself demands. The situation is catch-22 and then some. The film doesn't set up any individual villains and doesn't shy away from its protagonists' flaws and mistakes (as well as their perseverence and capacity for love). Rather, it underlines the problems designed into Social Services as a system, the no-win corners it creates for the very people it is supposed to help. It's about their disappointment and outrage, but also, and probably most of all, about their courage and strength. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.