It's a Free World... (2007)

One of my all time favorites.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Ken Loach is one of these British directors which really is able to take the pulse on the British society, or the modern Europe of today, if you like. Loach go right to the core of the modern slave market. a society which is not able to take care of the citizens, either they are legally in the country or not.When single mum Angie loses her job as recruiter for a shady firm operating in Poland, she decides to start a recruitment firm of her own together with her friend Rose. They start off legally, but meeting desperate illegal immigrants changes this. She starts off providing fake passports and papers. While all this going on, her son struggles at school.Ken Loach is such a brilliant storyteller, that you immediately get suck into the story. So realistic it is almost scary. Loach let his person gallery be charming, blunt and real. with the swearing at all.Just see it!

Ken Loach is one of Britain's most prolific directors nowadays. His movies and his personal style have also gathered a faithful group of fans and followers (and many awards, as well). He takes on many subjects that would otherwise have a hard time finding their way to the big screen, such as the Irish revolution or the actual state of unemployment and abuse of immigrants, which is the theme of 'It's a free world....' The script, written by Loach's regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, is really sober. There is not much in the sense of artificiality, with dialogue that seems real and fitting to the characters and setting. Perhaps too much. Their mumbling is quite hard to follow, and abundant, and most of the action on the screen feels a lot like a filling. This can be blamed on Loach's approach on directing, following his usual style of being just an observer. Although it's a commendable approach, it can also lead to make the movie quite boring and messy, which is the case with 'It's a Free World....' Most of the time, the movie just feels interested on showing how miserable are everyone's lives, which is guess is fitting to the context of the film, but it is a bit too much. The supposed-to-be humorous breaks, to make the movie easier to swallow are quite obtuse and scarce, leaving us with plain drama. And that is my main grumble about the movie: it feels so obsessed to show how miserable everything is that most of the times it just forgets that it is a movie. At the end I just wanted it to finish, as I was not only bored, but annoyed with how obvious and manipulative the movie turned out to be. The acting, as usual with Ken's movies, is filled with fresh faces. Most of the actors are newcomers, and that actually helps immersing the spectator in the movie, for good or bad. Their gibberish is so hard to follow that you might actually need the help of subtitles in order to know what is going on in most scenes. From the ensemble, Kierston Wareing stands out as the lead character, giving a much-needed stream of energy to the film. The rest, however, feel amateurish, which can be a good or a bad thing, considering the documental-like approach of Loach. 'It's a Free World...' sure isn't a movie for everyone. It is, like every Ken Loach film, a film striving for showing a reality, to criticize a wrong, and somehow, be food for thought. Sadly, that seems to be the one and only motivation behind this movie, it being absolutely oblivious that, after all, it is a film. That is a common problem, for me, with English social dramas: the obsession of showing how miserable life is, and nothing else. At the end, I was absolutely bored and pleading for it to end, instead of being shocked and disgusted to the reality 'It's a Free World...' tried so hard to criticize. I would still recommend it to those interested in the problems of immigration and work nowadays, but warning them that, as a film, it does not deliver at all.

After winning a well deserved Cannes Palm D'Or with "The wind that shakes the barley" (2006) that meet head-on the issue of the political issue of the IRA, auteur Ken Loach went on to tackle the social issue of illegal immigrants workers in London, with "It's a free world". While Loach, even when showing a degree of sympathy, always maintains an overriding objectivity, the IRA issue is one that is emotionally dramatic. "It's a free world", however, is presented with such detachment that it at times looks like a documentary, although it is by no means without its dramatic moments.This gritty tale, with profoundly disturbing realism, is told through the protagonist Angie, superbly portrayed by Kierston Wareing (who, incidentally, bears a certain resemblance to Angie Dickenson, to those who have watched movies long enough to remember her). A single mother of a sixth-grader, Angie loses her job and ventures out on her own, teaming up with roommate Rose to form an agency that arranges work for immigrant workers, often on a daily basis. The scene alternates between her personal life and business undertaking. In the former case, we see the continuing struggle to carry out a mother's responsibility to the eleven-year-old son who is staying with her parents on a temporary basis. There is also a very brief depiction of a romance with a very nice man, a worker in her labour force supply. It is the latter, however, that is the focus of the movie.With perfect division of work, Rose does all the administrative work while Angie, riding her bike in an image almost as cool as Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know which movies), goes around hangouts of immigrate workers to collect her work force. With repeated scenes, many of us in the uninformed audience are drawn into this realistically depicted world of daily logistic of assembling immigrant workers of all shape and size, roll calls and dispatching them to colour-coded trucks to send them off to various factories. Things seem to go fairly well until Angie (with a very reluctantly Rose) is lured into the lucrative business of using illegal immigrants.Gradually, the movie also turns into a taxing test of the audiences' scruples. Without passing judgment, Director Loach presents the audience with meticulous details for them to form theirs. We see how at the outset, Angie seems very sympathetic to the workers, to the extents that a young chap gives her a small gift to thank her for finding him such a good job. We see how she provides temporary accommodation at their place (with mild objections from Rose) to an Iranian family of four in a state of financial desperation. On the other hand, there is an ominous undercurrent of troubles of delayed wage payments by irresponsible employers. Initially, while these cheated workers pressure Angie for their wages, it looks as if she is as much as victim as they are. Gradually, however, she begins to change, becoming an exploiter herself, unscrupulous to a point when Rose can no longer live with her own conscience and withdraws from the partnership. Physical violence and threats only serve to harden Angie. In the last, open-ended, scene we see her in a recruiting trip to Ukraine. Whether she will eventually get into serious trouble is no longer important. The pressing question, as the audience leaves the cinema, is what kind of a woman is Angie. There would undoubtedly be a wide spectrum of views, from sympathy to denunciation. But perhaps even that is not important. Maybe Angie is only a case which Loach employs to educate the audience of a cruel reality.

That film has to be seen all over the world. It shows how in our globalized world the migration of people is perfectly organized and managed outside all legality with the accomplice-ship and cooperation of most governments or national services in the western countries concerned by these migrations. Here London, England. The volunteers (!?!) are essentially coming from the European Community (Poland) but also non members states from eastern Europe (Ukraine) and some countries going through a crisis like Iran and Iraq. The human beings are cattle as soon as they put their first toe in the system. They pay heftily for their passage first, just like the Jewish community had to pay for the passage of the Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. Then they will be exploited at two levels. First by the skyrocketing rents they pay for one fourth of a room or one fifth of a caravan. Second they will get some work every morning for the day and with no certitude of anything: no contract, no health insurance, no guaranteed payment of the miserable salary, no guaranteed schooling for the children. Everything is done outside any official declaration, evading taxes and all controls. And no serious service is doing anything to find out and bring things back in line. But the worst part is, though some men are behind this kind of slave market, the main flesh-eating character is a white woman, a false blonde, divorced with an 11 year old son abandoned to her own parents. She has a black associate who will finally drop out when the other trespasses beyond the narrow line between exploitation and slavery on one side and cattle- or even garbage-processing on the other. One day she will call immigration authorities to report a clandestine camp in order to get it emptied for her load of slaves that is arriving on the following morning. The black woman will be replaced and the whole forced-labor merry-go-round will start again and amplify its operation. The only advantage of being exploited by a woman is that young males will have to perform some personal service to the female slave-manager to get work on the following day. A film to be seen urgently. I was divinely surprised by the causticity of Ken Loach I was considering as slightly tamed before seeing this film. He can still bite, the old pit-bull.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines