5. Family Life (1971)
Directed by Ken Loach, this is a highly naturalistic, almost documentary style study about a young woman called Janice who lives with her conservative, killjoy parents who lead a dreary working class existence and see any attempt on the behalf of Janice to have fun as bad behaviour. When Janice gets pregnant, they force her into an abortion and when her psyche cracks, they blame her for deliberately trying to upset them. Things escalate with Janice meandering into psychosis. Typically, the doctors and psychiatrists are of little help, and are in fact at times, downright insulting and patronising. With no adequate support or treatment, the last we see of Janice is her being wheeled in to a symposium full of medical students as a 'specimen' Janice is a good example of how environmental pressures can create mental illness. If she was not squashed by her stultifying parents or mishandled by psychiatry, she might have stood a chance. Her 'rebellion' that is so shaming is nothing more than teenage girl frolics. Okay she had the misfortune to become pregnant and I guess that back in the 1970s it would have been a big deal. But her parents treat her with a cruel disdain. Filmed in a social realism style, the arguments that break out are highly naturalistic and you can imagine them happening in any family. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the dialog was ad-libbed. A fascinating study of madness caused by environmental factors.