I’ve always like Ken Loach movies because i’m a lefty symp and a sucker for women with British accents. The last one I saw from him was, if memory serves, My Name is Joe, i know that he’s done a few since then, like the well-received Wind That blows through the barley (or whatever it was called). This one is about Angela (Angie), a single mother in London who gets laid off and then decides to start her own recruiting business, where she finds jobs for low-wage proles from Eastern Europe and beyond. Of course, all the ethical and social problems facing contemporary England with regard to low-wage labor, the urban poor, and immigration are somehow distilled into the characters, which throws everything into relief and makes the movie fairly easy to understand. The lead performance is great, she’s quite attractive, plucky, at times a tender mom trying to what’s best for her son and yet at other times can stoop so low as to lie and cheat desperate foreign workers just so she can get ahead. Everything rattles on at a good pace, and while the first part of the movie is dedicated to their can-do spirit in starting a business, the movie veers in the last act somewhat, throwing in a few plot twists and turns. The ending is a bit ambiguous–you see that she has to go on with this morally questionable vocation of hers, but this time because she’s been forced, under threat of violence to her and her son–to repay money that she owes the workers. At the end, she hesitates when she takes the precious euro cash from an aging Ukrainian woman. Angie knows that this is how her racket works–the eastern europeans are eager and optimistic, and she plays along, peddling sometimes false hope to these people. She rationalizes this as “giving them a chance,” but it becomes obvious throughout the movie that this system is built on exploitation. People refuse to pay money, skim corners at the expense of others. People are fleeced, their fates put in the hands of some unscrupulous if not outright evil factory owners and recruiters. Of course, I don’t know the sociological truth of this, because i don’t know much about social realities in London or Britain except from what friends and the media tell me, but i think it’s a fine film, and would definitely recommend it, if not highly, at least as an entertaining and thought-provoking movie, which already makes it better than most of the crap out there.
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