MOVIE REVIEW : Loach’s ‘Ladybird’: An Unrelenting View of Misery : Director’s semi-documentary style frames the story of a woman who loses six of her children to the state authorities.

Ken Loach’s “Ladybird, Ladybird” is so unrelievably grim that it’s remarkable the filmmakers had the strength to get on with it. It’s not an inspirational downer or a call-to-action. Even though it’s based on a true story, it’s not even an expose.

The horror story of a woman, Maggie (Crissy Rock), who loses six of her children to the state authorities is almost too painful to experience. Loach, and his screenwriter, Rona Munro, don’t attempt to distance the audience from the pain. They don’t even try to modulate it. It’s just there on the screen, like a thick, suffocating fog.

Loach is perhaps the least compromising--and least commercial--of major British directors. It’s not just his use of non-actors and newcomers, or his semi-documentary style, or his guerrilla left-wing political sympathies. Loach doesn’t offer audiences a helping hand, and that can sometimes seem like a rebuff. With “Ladybird, Ladybird,” the rebuff at least makes stylistic sense--it places us in the same trapped, enraged position as Maggie.

Her character is not softened or sentimentalized for us. Rock, a Liverpool stand-up comedian acting in her first movie, gives her an ornery, block-like force. She has been battered by a series of men--the four children she takes care of at the beginning of the movie all have different fathers--but she’s something of a battering ram herself. All the punishment she has received has given her a chunky fortitude. She’s wary not only of other people but of herself--of her ability to feel anything.

When she meets Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a Paraguayan refugee, in a pub, his doting unconditional tenderness is like an affront to her. Jorge is almost too good to be true: He needs a reason to love and Maggie is it. It takes her most of the movie to recognize his goodness. In other words, it takes that long for her to comprehend her own goodness.

Maggie’s long slide with the social service authorities in west London begins when one of her sons is accidentally burned at the women’s shelter where she is holing up. Because she left the boy unattended with her other children, and because she has in the past exposed them to domestic violence, the state takes them away from her.

It’s a vicious cycle: The more enraged Maggie becomes at what the authorities have perpetrated, the more they regard her as dangerously unfit for motherhood. When she and Jorge have children of their own, the same cycle is repeated. Did Dickens ever dream up anything this ghoulish?

But Loach, for all his docu-realism, isn’t quite the even-handed chronicler he pretends to be. When Maggie and Jorge first make love, for example, the soundtrack tinkles with soft guitars and pan-pipes. The social service types, especially the judges, are mostly implacable. Surely, they must have felt in their own minds that what they were doing was best for the children. But Loach doesn’t extend his sympathies to them. To do so would be to disrupt the film’s neat arrangement of concerns.

It may appear that we are getting a more “real” take on life with Loach, but his realism lacks the flavors that give drama its richness. Nobody in “Ladybird, Ladybird,” not even Maggie, grows very much in the course of the film. Their unvarying quality is probably meant to be taken as mythic--these people are acting out a primal drama in which the drama is much more pertinent than the people.

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

* MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes graphic domestic violence and a depiction of burn wounds .

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‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ Crissy Rock: Maggie Vladimir Vega: Jorge Clare Perkins: Jill Jason Stracey: Sean A Samuel Goldwyn Co. and Film Four International presentation of a Parallax Pictures release. Director Ken Loach. Producer Sally Hibbin. Screenplay by Rona Munro. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd. Editor Jonathan Morris. George Fenton. Production design Martin Johnson. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* Now playing at the Nuart, Santa Monica Boulevard at the San Diego Freeway; (310) 478-6379.