European Films

British filmmaker Ken Loach might have won the Palme d’Or for a historical war drama (and one in which the Brits were on the loosing side, too), but he will most likely be remembered years from now for his socially committed films. With his latest, the Venice Competition entry It’s a Free World…, the director again collaborates with screenwriter Paul Laverty and revisits several themes of his organic oeuvre for his story of illegal immigrant workers in London and the bike-riding blonde bombshells that exploit them. It will likely do moderate business much like the other recent films of the director, though the characters’ emotions are not as finely modulated as in The Wind that Shakes the Barley or even Ae Fond Kiss.

Laverty starts off strong with a sequence that introduces us to feisty Londoner Angie (newcomer Kierston Wareing), just days before she is fired from the recruitment agency where she works, an ironic twist of fate that drives Angie to set up her own agency for foreign labourers with her best friend and flatmate Rose (Juliet Ellis). Though swearing to do everything legally as soon as they have made some money, things quickly go from bad to worse as Angie slips into exploiting the very people she initially wanted to help, with Rose relegated to the Jimminy Cricket role of her conscience.  

Laverty and Loach’s decision to approach the lives of immigrant workers in the English capital through the eyes of a London native who gives them work seems like a fresh take on the familiar tales of difficult or even desperate conditions of immigrant workers both legal and illegal, but their choice of Angie, a bike-riding blonde bombshell, for a protagonist seems misguided and miscast.

 

Wareing is certainly an attention-grabber and lights up the screen with her presence, but her range extends little beyond being a spunky eye-catcher. Angie’s transformation from laid-off worker to entrepreneur and do-gooder to ruthless exploiter of immigrants is difficult to swallow, and she is not aided in this respect by Laverty’s script, which seems to take the fact that she will be blinded by the money once she has it in her pocket for granted, without any second thoughts and no further trace of her compassion.

 

The various themes treated here have surfaced in some of Loach’s previous works, including Bread and Roses about Mexican immigrants in the US; Ae Fond Kiss about second-generation immigrants in Scotland and The Navigators, about railway workers fighting against privatisation. In this sense, the film deepens the organic Loach oeuvre with a new entry that crystallises some of the ideas that have floated around in his previous work, though It’s a Free World… (note the three punctuation marks of hesitation at the end) is not as nuanced as any of these films, using Angie not so much as the emotional anchor of the film but rather as a -- in this case rather good-looking -- example of how rotten society is. Because of this, the film lacks the emotional involvement that allowed the messages of films like The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Ae Fond Kiss to register not only in the brain but also in the heart.

 

It’s a Free World… was shot on location in Poland, Ukraine and the UK, though the foreign locations add little spice and the use of local actors (including the affable Polish actor Leslaw Zurek as a one-night stand of Angie’s) feels equally unexploited. Cinematography by Nigel Willoughby is unusually luminous without resorting to artificial lighting, echoing his work on the French comedy Comme t'y es belle! In this free world things might be ugly, but at least it’s sunny.