Angie gets the sack from a recruitment agency for bad behaviour in public. Seizing the chance she teams up with her flatmate Rose to run a similar business from their kitchen. With immigrants desperate to work the opportunities are considerable particularly for two girls....
Master dramatist Ken Loach's first feature after 'The Wind That Shakes The Barley' took top prize at Cannes: 'It's A Free World...' is an excellent, complex and timely look at Eastern European immigration to Britain. At first glance, it would appear that the only way to address such an issue on film, is to either portray Polish immigrants as oppressed, heroic martyrs or aggressive, freeloading scum, needless to say; neither approach would do the subject justice; and though its' set almost entirely in London, screenwriter Paul Laverty isn't afraid to look at the bigger picture; cleverly presenting the dilemma from a global, as opposed to nationalist, perspective.
'It's a Free World...' sees 34-year-old target driven recruitment consultant Angie (Kierston Wareing) successfully dispatch Pole after Pole to England for work, the absurdity of it all briefly glimpsed as she reads off a corporate mandate suggesting wholly inappropriate alternative professions for the eager economic migrants. Now we've all met an Angie in our time: an archetypal Essex girl and single mum, her loud, loose and feisty demeanour as familiar a British cliché as football hooligans, fish & chips or walking the dog. Newcomer Kierston Wareing does well to convey Angie's often paradoxical actions, and shows how an injustice done to her (she's sacked after an altercation with drunken colleagues and her lecherous boss) triggers an almost subliminal ideological reaction; one that genuinely makes her believe in the justification for her switch from working class heroine, to exploitative superbitch / administrational gang master. Angie and her flatmate Juliet Ellis are quick to spot a niche in the market, and begin scouting Poles into jobs by the dozen; illegal immigrants picked up outside pubs and off the streets are put to work with the girls making a tidy profit along the way, it is, in many respects, the realisation of Dave Moss's plan to emulate Gerry Graff and get the good leads in 'Glengarry / Glenross'. But cutting corners soon puts their business in jeopardy, and in spite of her friends pleas to call it quits, Angie gets in way over her head and its not long before she's facing a full scale revolt better suited to the islander slaves from 'Burn!' or the worker's wrath that befell Brigitte Helm's Robot Maria in 'Metropolis'.
Kierston Wareing is an expressive and charismatic young actress, some would even go so far as to use the trite term 'blonde bombshell', and though she might well be suited to something a little more glamorous in the future, Wareing retains an everywoman look about her, in much the same way as a dishevelled Juliet Binnoche or Robin Wright Penn can hold an audience with their ability to create believable characters on screen. Wareing gives it her all in a fearless performance which rightly saw her nominated at Venice, its difficult to say whether we"ll see or hear from her again, but as far this picture goes; she does an incredible job creating one the most memorable female anti-heroes since Robin Wright Penn in 'Sorry, Haters'.
Watching this film, one can't help but lament the monumental failure of the capitalist system as it exits today, for Loach convincingly portrayals this monstrous mechanism at work: An insatiable, unstable and ultimately unsustainable entity, which needs a slave labour force to suppress proletarian internationalism, keep down costs & boost the economy, and in that respect; Angie isn't a villain at all, in fact, she's just doing what anyone raised in this system would do. There was a hint at a similar argument in Stephen Marshall's 'This Revolution', where Marshall's character casts doubt over anti-globalisation protestor Rosario Dawson's militant ideology, questioning whether she'd have the courage of her convictions to fight the inequities of the system if it began to serve her basic needs. Italian despot Benito Mussolini once defined fascism as "...the collusion between corporations and the state" thus we have Globalisation using our economic intuitions, entwined within the political framework of the so-called international community, to engineer and exacerbate conditions which give rise to socio-political inequity, thus widening the gap between rich & poor. Angie is simply a product of her environment, a model citizen in an externally enforced socio-economic world order, and that's the genius of Ken Loach; for just when you think you've a got a handle on how he works, Ken throws a wrongun and puts a whole new spin on things e.g. Angie's father, initially portrayed as hostile towards the Polish "occasionals", he manages to put this argument into perspective with an insightful comment about how "one more cheap plumber in Britain, means one less good doctor in Poland", and thus we realise that its his 'Trade Union' past speaking, trying to be a heard over the din in an abyss of a new-old world that knows next to nothing about internationalism, solidarity or worker's rights. 'It's A Free World...' is one of the director's best, and should be seen by all fans of serious cinema.
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Drama directed by Ken Loach. After Angie (Kierston Wareing) gets the sack from a recruitment agency for bad behaviour in public, she decides to team up with her flatmate Rose (Juliet Ellis) and run a similar business from their kitchen. With immigrants desperate to work the opportunities are considerable, for the two girls in particular.
After losing her job at a recruitment agency, Angie decides, with the help of her flatmate, to set up her own illegal agency for immigrant workers in Britain. However, Angie's greed soon starts to surface. As with BREAD AND ROSES, acclaimed director Ken Loach focuses on labour issues and the exploitation of immigrant workers. This improvised, slice of life drama sees Loach continue his dedication to social realism and this, combined with the various documentaries Loach made in the 1980s, makes IT'S A FREE WORLD a powerful companion piece to Nick Broomfield's GHOSTS, which looked at the exploitation of Chinese illegal immigrants in Britain.
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