Capitalist
punishment

>>Class strife goes global in
Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World…

by MATTHEW HAYS

Like many great auteurs, Ken Loach often seems to be remaking his own films. In his latest, It’s a Free World…, the director revisits a host of his favourite themes and motifs, exploring issues of class and economic hardship through the prism of the British kitchen sink.

Here, the director behind the 2006 award-winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley has a protagonist, single mom Angie (played with ferocity by Kierston Wareing) struggling to survive in contemporary London. Her son is having trouble in grade school and, after fighting back against some bullies, is threatened with expulsion.

But there’s little that Mom can do, stuck with having to leave her son with her less-than-thrilled parents. Angie is having serious strife of her own, getting canned by ungrateful bosses who simply cite the orders of head office as the reasoning behind her downsizing. It’s all part of Loach’s grim real world, in which faceless corporations rip off (yet) more individuals, people who are increasingly powerless to fight back or take control of their economic situation.

Angie then decides to start her own business, running a temporary work service that lines up factories, restaurants and anyone else with the cheap labour they need. Loach’s set-up is a solid one: Angie is a decent sort who just wants to make enough money to get by and to eventually move her son back in with her. It’s the niggling compromises along the way that he’s getting at, the slippery slope that has her give in to hiring illegal immigrants (despite the potential legal fallout) and stepping on some heads in her climb to higher financial ground.

It’s a Free World… is made all the more powerful by the very fact that Angie is not some kind of unfeeling monster. At one point, she takes in a family of illegal immigrants from Iran for a night. Later, she realizes that some of the people she’s turning on are this family that she tried to help.

It’s the trap Loach sets for capitalism itself—a system he sees as corrupt, and corrupting, and one that offers up the cruel pretense of freedom. Another powerful indictment from one of Britain’s most enduring filmmakers.

It’s a Free World…
opens this Friday, April 4

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