Though it does shine a light on the lives of immigrants working for a pittance in London, England, It’s a Free World isn’t quite an exposé. The film features unjust labour laws and families denied asylum from brutal regimes, but ultimately these stories are incidental to that of the film’s central focus — Angie (Kierston Wareing), a struggling British single mom and recruiting agent. Felt up and fired by middle management, up to her bottle-blond locks in debt and living in a rented home with a son making early forays into schoolyard pugilism, Angie is 33 and tired of spinning her wheels. Drawing on her extensive recruitment experience (putting Slavic names on bum paycheques for her employers, essentially), she teams up with her intelligent but underachieving flat-mate to become her own boss. Using partner Rose’s (Juliet Ellis) credit to buy a motorbike, Angie roars up to factories and construction sites as a tough vixen with a healthy proposition. Before she can shake out her hair and unzip her leather jumpsuit, she has various employers hiring workers through her.
For a socialist, director Ken Loach sure makes guerrilla capitalism seem fun. However, the money isn’t consistent enough for the two lasses to erase their dead-end stations in life, and Angie and Rose find themselves faced with a series of moral dilemmas as they try to finally push themselves over the top financially at the expense of their workers. Angie isn’t hesitant to remind Rose that such dilemmas are faced by every British consumer who saves on the back of cheap labour, but Rose soon realizes that the knot in her stomach is becoming more difficult to ignore with each choice they make.
By focusing on Angie instead of the workers she exploits, It’s a Free World… becomes a moral statement as much as a social one. This is about one woman trying to get by in ways that put her at odds with both human compassion and the law, even though the two are hardly congruent. Angie can’t quite align herself with right or wrong on any consistent basis, in much the same way that she bounced from job to job before landing in the recruiting business. She should identify with and feel empathy for the lost souls that she culls from the desperate herd, but she can only think of her own problems and how this landless underclass can be her solution. This is no re-imagining of Oskar Schindler — it’s a story of exploitation. With the film’s deliberately bare-bones exposition, the viewer can only guess Angie’s reasons for seeking to cure her chronic rootlessness by exploiting her countrymen who are so similarly afflicted.
