Bread and Roses

"...an atmosphere bristling with energy and tension..."
(Worth A Look)

If leftist agit-prop narrative cinema has a true north, one of the people who springs first to mind is filmmaker Ken Loach. His movies are impassioned to the point of being didactic in places, but he always makes a good case for the subject at hand, creating a completely naturalistic feel while handling some complicated plot threads.

A chronicler of people fighting uphill battles against poverty and social injustice, Loach explores a subject in BREAD AND ROSES that is at once universal in its implications and very specific in its details: the 1999 janitors’ strike in Los Angeles.


When we meet Maya (Pilar Padilla), she is one of a group of Mexicans illegally crossing the U.S. border. After Maya narrowly avoids being raped by one of the smugglers involved in the crossing, she makes her way to the East L.A. home of her sister Rosa (Elpidia Carillo) and her family.


Rosa works as a cleaning woman in a downtown skyscraper, which Maya sees as a desirable job. Although she at first protests – truthfully – that there are hundreds of applicants, Rosa gets Maya on the cleaning shift. The supervisor (George Lopez, excellent as a perpetually exasperated, self-righteous type) is a bully who humiliates the cleaners, but Maya doesn’t think anything can be done. Then union organizer Sam Shapiro (Adrien Brody) turns up on the scene, lobbying the building’s janitors to demand better wages and health benefits. Rosa, with good reason, is fearful of the possible consequences. Maya, however, believes that life can and should be fair and takes on the cause of unionizing her fellows.


The script by Paul Laverty takes it as a given that all people, undocumented workers included, have a right to earn a decent wage in an environment free from harassment. Although BREAD AND ROSES concerns itself with more immediate aspects of the characters’ lives, it’s sobering to contemplate how controversial this concept actually is and how few movies – even those that ostensibly support workplace human rights – really tackles it head-on.


BREAD certainly has a few moments that are overly on-the-nose, speeches that could be shortened and bits of melodrama, but the set-up is generally convincing and Loach and Laverty create an atmosphere bristling with energy and tension that often allows for surprising humor. Maya’s creativity in the face of dire circumstances has a mixture of crowd-pleasing panache and plausible practicality that make her a compelling, life-sized heroine.


Screen newcomer Padilla is a major asset, utterly believable throughout as an inexperienced young woman who nevertheless has enormous firmness of purpose. Carillo is powerful as the likewise strong but embittered Rosa and Brody exudes the earnest good will and slight high-handedness of a determined activist who’s an outsider to the group he wants to aid. Tim Roth, Oded Fehr and Ron Perlman turn up (presumably as themselves) as extras in a party scene in an entertainment law office.


BREAD AND ROSES takes the unusual but sensible step of subtitling all of its dialogue. Not only is the spoken Spanish subtitled in English, but the spoken English is also subtitled in Spanish, making the film equally accessible to both English and Spanish speakers.

This is literally the most visible element (it’s there in writing, after all) illustrating the filmmakers’ desire to make their work accessible to the widest audience possible, but it’s also there in their style, their plot and their people. BREAD AND ROSES succeeds in movie terms in addition to serving as an articulate statement on a subject that, at least indirectly, affects virtually everyone.-- Abbie Bernstein