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The circle only has one side
~ irigitte fardot , 4/16/2010 4:37 ÖÖ
Political Ideologies Response Paper
Movie Report (dandirik papers vol. 8899876)
Title: It’s A Free World…
Writer: Paul Laverty
Director: Ken Loach
(...) THE CIRCLE ONLY HAS ONE SIDE*
In the movie It’s A Free World…, the writer Paul Laverty and the director who’s famous for his political films, Ken Loach, tell us about the vicious cycle of capitalism through some characters. The movie is basically about the world order we are practicing today and presents us the story of a once-worker-now-boss woman and a group of immigrant workers coming to England to – simply – keep on living. The title itself, actually, gives us an idea about what we should be expecting. We are living in a free world, as it’s been said for a matter of time; but are all the people actually allowed to be free?
The people who hold the means of production, who are employers, from any background or any level (no matter how wealthy they are), who are living at the cost of other people’s lives are the targetted in the movie. Their way of living is questioned and criticized.
The main character, Angie, is an employee working for an employment agency in which she is surrounded mostly by men, and she is portrayed as she would not really get to the point where she wants to be in her career - as a woman. One day she gets mobbed by one of her bosses. She reactions instead of keeping quiet and she gets fired the next day. At this point, we see her as a rightful worker who demands justice and we applaud her reaction. But things change in the next scenes where she decides to open up an agency with a friend and starts exploiting immigrant workers for her own profit. She does exactly the same as what she had seen in her previous job. We realize that nothing changes; nothing but the roles and the characters.
Ken Loach wants to make sure that his message is transmitted: it is only a free world for the ones who can be free. The sentence coming out of Angie’s mouth to her friend Rose says it all when Rose asks her to pay the workers their money: “If you really want to pay them, you can pay them out of your own pocket; it’s a free world!”
Yes, it was a free world but to those workers, freedom only meant a day with food and little money to look after the ones they are responsible to. They did not ask for more or less. We could get the idea from one of the scenes, actually, where Angie’s son was taken away from home by the immigrant worker for a couple of minutes. Those people who captured Jamie never hurt him and never told him anything that might frighten him. They were just concerned about equity and justice. And the only addressee was Angie, no other person or nothing else. I think this was a good detail.
On the other hand, in spite of how crucial Angie seems, Loach secretly tells that no matter how rightful and sensitive you might be, the system forces you to exploit others once you get the chance. Angie has got her own reasons for doing that and maybe Rose do not have that kind of reasons but that does not mean that she will not have one day. Thus, we can say that the director knows not everything is just black or white and he wants us to realize that fact too. It is just the system which took root and stays there strongly with just one solid color.
If we stopped to think like a social scientist and think more like a liberalist (and as a matter of fact, like a neo-liberalist), we might further this last argument. Maybe the movie does not efficiently tell us about the patterns that drive all these people to be this way. And maybe Social Darwinism is right in a way and instead of complaining we should all be pursuing our own ways 'out'. Or maybe it is just a corrupted form of the system we are faced today and that the modern/contemporary social liberalism has nothing to do with it.
Still, there is this cycle and no doubt we are a part of it.
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