•
Rating: I want to preface this by saying it's the first Kenneth Loach film I've seen, so my knowledge of him is a mix of everything and nothing that can be gleaned from rumors, slim biographies, and the praises of the most enthusiastic fans found online, where you can read that he's a left-wing director (assuming that means anything, which to me sounds like nonsense) and that he more or less makes the same kind of film repeatedly. I'll be quite happy to verify both these hypotheses or whatever they may be. But rather than focusing on these trivialities, let's get to what matters, to the essence: the film.
“It's a free world...” is dated 2007, with the subject and screenplay by Paul Laverty. The story unfolds like a spiral, meaning if we consider a three-dimensional space x, y, and z, at some point, our function, which is a metaphor for the story, reaches a point with the same x and y coordinates but has undergone a Δz and this change occurs in Angie, the protagonist played by an excellent (and I hope I'm not misled by purely aesthetic parameters) yet unknown Kierston Wareing. To translate my mathematical musings, the film begins and ends with the protagonist finding herself doing exactly the same things, but in a position and state of mind that are profoundly different.
Angie is a single mother, a temp worker in the paradoxical position of providing precarious employment to others, as she works for an employment agency. Her job involves traveling to countries with high unemployment rates (Ukraine, Poland, etc.) to recruit workers to bring back to England. Her unwarranted dismissal, combined with debts and a healthy dose of frustration, leads Angie to set up her own agency outside the law with her friend (who has a degree), Rose—an agency that's tax-free and unscrupulous. But I won't dwell too much on the plot.
In the background, but not too out of sight, we see the world of foreign laborers and those who exploit them. In the foreground, we have Angie herself, a human being, a hypocrite, a person who needs to extricate herself from the mess she's in and leverages those below her to do so, simultaneously convincing herself she's not doing anything wrong, “everyone does it”, and after all, she's giving those poor people a chance, a job. But this conviction, like every small glimmer of solidarity (though still hypocritical) in her vanishes as the money, threats, and wounds on her face and body increase. Angie becomes ruthless (mind you, not that healthy and sincere ruthlessness of Col. Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now”, but still a hypocritical ruthlessness) like the scumbags who had fired her at the beginning, and she will continue (or rather, dwell in parallel with those) their dirty work, a transformation from victim to perpetrator, a perpetrator who no longer questions moral issues, simply accepts that this is how this “free world” works, either you eat or you get eaten.
Loading comments slowly
