Beneath the Kilt, a Modern Scotland

No, this is a Ken Loach film, and though it’s sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed, one of the director’s long-running concerns, “The Angels’ Share” is also a fish-out-of-water satire about Scots in Scotland. And that, as it turns out, has also been one of Mr. Loach’s longtime themes, albeit one seldom noted during his five decades of making movies.

In the film Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has renounced violence and is desperate for work. Sentenced to community service for a transgression, he befriends the fellow scofflaws Albert, Mo and Rhino.

When their community-service supervisor, Harry (John Henshaw), gives his crew members a break by taking them on a tour of a distillery and subsequently to a tasting in Edinburgh, Robbie discovers he has a connoisseur’s nose for whisky. He and his friends hatch a harebrained plan to steal a cask of Malt Mill (named for an Islay distillery that closed in 1962) that’s expected to sell for £1 million at an auction.

To allay suspicion on their Highland trek the four disguise themselves in kilts as “whisky train-spotters.” It takes a French tourist to tell Rhino he is wearing his backward. Albert’s sporran (the pouch that hangs over a kilt-wearer’s groin) bruises his private parts. A close-up suggests Robbie is awed by a vista of a loch. The gormless Albert is confused by his first sight of Edinburgh Castle.

“The point was to show that the Sir Walter Scott image of kilts and sporrans bears no reality to the lives of ordinary Scottish people,” Mr. Loach said in a telephone interview from London. “The Highlands are a force of nature not to be parodied, but the use of Highland scenes and tartan on shortbread tins and of Edinburgh Castle on millions of postcards is largely an invention of the tourist industry.”

“The Angels’ Share,” an IFC film opening in Manhattan on Friday, is the 10th full-length film that the English Mr. Loach has made with the Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, and the fifth they have made in Mr. Laverty’s homeland. “There’s a quaint view of Scotland — all kilts, bagpipes, whisky, misty mountains and clear streams,” Mr. Laverty said recently. “The kids in the film take advantage of all that through their wit and streetwiseness.”

In preparation Mr. Laverty talked with community-service workers and learned that “all of them drank cheap supermarket alcohol, but few had tasted Scotland’s national drink,” which is promoted internationally by a £4 billion industry. And few had visited the romantic parts of the Highlands and islands, where whisky is distilled.

Jonathan Murray, who teaches film at Edinburgh College of Art, noted that “The Angels’ Share” is not the first Loach and Laverty film to place modern city dwellers on the rural terrain of Scotland’s semi-mythical past.

“The idea that there is a heritage version of Scotland that exists for the delectation of tourists, not locals, is a consistent refrain within their Scottish-set work,” Mr. Murray said in an e-mail. In their 1996 film, “Carla’s Song,” a bus driver “literally gets mired when he transplants his double-decker from the mean streets of Glasgow to the country lanes of Loch Lomond.”

David Archibald, who teaches film at Glasgow University, is studying “The Angels’ Share.” “Kilts and tartan are the objects that have been picked up and spat back, in some ways, at Scottish culture,” he said. “Loach and Laverty subvert them but also show the disconnect that exists between them and people at the bottom of Scottish society.”

He cited a scene in “My Name Is Joe” (1998) that shows how these two filmmakers juxtaposed images of stereotypical Scottishness with impoverished Scots “to call into question precisely the touristic image which is broadcast abroad.”

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