It’s a Free World & NFT Ken Loach Q&A
Yup, another visit to the NFT, this time to catch Ken Loach’s new film, ‘It’s a Free World‘. You’ll no doubt be surprised to hear it’s another socialist tract, concerning the fortunes of Angie, a East End based single mother in present day London. As the film opens Angie is working as a recruitment consultant for a UK based firm out in Poland. After being fired for resisting the advances of a superior she decides to set up her own company, drawing in the unskilled and desperate foreign workforce that struggle in their poverty stricken ghettos, hidden below the margins of society.
On a micro level it’s obviously exposing poverty and the results of immigration in contemporary Britain, whilst on the macro level it’s nothing less than a powerful treatise on globalization and the horrific exploitation that is currently endured by millions of the planets poor and uneducated. Loach employs his usual neo-realist approach of utilising non-professional actors, a minimal use of music, a devotion to realism in plot and the characters experiencing the full consequences of their actions that are quite shocking and powerful – there are a couple of scenes which are quite horrific. Most effective of all for me was the ability the film has for making the audience at one moment sympathise with and like Angie, then suddenly being absolutely horrified by her actions and ruthless selfishness – she is a definite product of the 1980’s. It has a bleak ending but I strongly urge you to catch this on TV (or better still at the cinema) on Channel 4, who as part financers are screening it next week.
The Q&A was entertaining although it felt like more of a communist party meeting than a film discussion given the focus on global politics. Whether you like or loathe his politics, I think you must admire someone with Loach’s strength of conviction who has consistently delivered his own projects without interference, exactly as he envisaged them, undiluted or amended merely for populist success. It really is a crime that the right wing press in the UK frequently crucify Loach due to his left wing credentials, yet elsewhere in Europe he is admired as a first class film-maker who consistently wins prizes at international film festivals including Canne, Venice and Berlin. He was quite charming and eloquent, summing up nicely that peculiar trend in American film and culture that has always kept him away from Hollywood – the ‘ruthless sentimentality, or Disney and Regan as I like to call it…’
Minty's Menagerie 
Wonders to self what films, apart from Kes, of Ken Loach’s have I seen?
Checks.
Oh.
He made Carla’s Song? Cor, I never knew that.
T’was a good film, very funny in places. Saw it in a cinema in Oslo. Was dead weird watching it with Norwegian subtitles.
September 18, 2007 at 8:14 PM
Really nice site; I found it by accident via google. I’ve just seen It’s a Free World; oh, I hated it though, such cloth-eared dialogue. A few short stretches of believable British English, and then – clunk. And always quietly hectoring, lecturing, here a bit of uplift, there an undiscretely placed socialist sermon. The real scandal, IMHO, is the praise Loach seems to garner in Europe. I guess for these audiences migrant workers are just bunny rabbits to sentimentalise over. None of it’s real, you know – Carla’s Song’s another classic example – none of it has any reality outside Loach’s socialist dream world. It’s one of these films like Dirty Pretty Things – that’s another one – utterly fake, just the modern socailly aware counterpart to a Millais picture of a golden haired child blowing bubbles. I’d recommend Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts – that’s a film on the same subject that tells it how it is without wandering off into fantasy or demanding sympathy, but still breaks the heart.
September 24, 2007 at 10:11 PM