Aging champion of social justice, Ken Loach, decides to tackle the issue of illegal guest workers, how they’re treated, and the industry that’s sprung up around them. Uneven, yet sort-of watch-able, says the Badger.
The movie opens with a long scene of hopeless Poles milling around a greasy recruitment agency called CoreForce Recruitment who are eventually called up to face Angela (Kierston Wareing), the main recruiter. The poles pay a sum of money (250 GBP) for the “right” to work in the UK. They are set up with temporary visas and shipped off to do poorly paid work in general construction, factory work, farm labor, and the standard starvation-wage bottom-of-the-barrel shit jobs no one else wants to do. In the following scene we see her chat up the classic immigrant with a heart of gold, Karol. Eventually she’s sexually harassed by her greasy co-workers until the point of tears which isn’t all that surprising since Angela spends most of this movie prancing around in leopard print coat that screams “I charge by the hour!” We’re definitely off to a good start.

She chooses to spend the night with the aforementioned Karol, and we get treated to the nastiest of British pick up lines when a slightly tipsy Angela hoarsely whispers “Tonight you can water my goldfish”. Mental note: Never pick up British women with bad dye-jobs.

She gets fired for an unspecified reason, and soon she’s meandering around her apartment smoking and having a breakdown, all the while complaining to her roommate Rose (Juliet Ellis) who is just shameful in this role. Now, I don’t know if this was a fluke on her part or if she’s a hack, but she basically spends the entire movie bitching and acting really badly. Apparently someone must have written “must look worried” in her directions, because she looks worried, in a fake way. This makes every scene where she has a crisis of conscience (and there are a few of them) cringe worthy. The scene where she starts berating Angela in the car is a perfect example of this. Her grating voice and accent does not make things any better.

Eventually Angela gets her hands on a large, bad-ass motorbike and we get to see her in tight leather distracting us from the fact that every other female in this depressing story is either old, homely, named Ludmila or all three. She starts driving around and flirting with the crème de la crème of British factory managers and other assorted scumbags with broken moral compasses. Around here the central theme becomes painfully obvious; it’s really a movie about greed, and what greed does to people. We get to see Angela rip people off, lie, and in the sort-of climax, call immigration on a campsite where she’s previously helped a destitute Iranian family find shelter, just so she can warehouse a new bunch of Ukrainian guest workers. Lovely. There’s also a fairly uninteresting subplot with her delinquent son (oh, so she’s a dead beat mom, who could have known?) that just pops out of nowhere about half-way through. The son is also an excuse to introduce her grandfather, who, of course is poor, yet still has his pride because he always did an honest day’s work.

In the last part of the movie her friend Derek, a construction foreman, gets ripped off, which means she can’t pay her workers. Suddenly, she’s a victim of some righteous anger and we get treated to a nice little scene where three profoundly angry Poles (in leather jackets, of course) tie her up and tell her about how horrible it is to work. She swears she’ll pay them back if they do not harm her son. We get to see Angela fly to Ukraine and start up a new recruitment racket and the film ends abruptly right there.

The movies underlying message is never washed away, and despite some attempts to the contrary, the film never descends into sloppy, emotional hell. Kierston Wareing is a really good lead, and some of the guest workers are convincingly scary and desperate. Ken Loach obviously wanted to kick the people who employ illegals in the balls with this one, and he most certainly pulled it off. It’s all about greed and maximizing profits and to hell with the consequences; it’s a brave new world, right? Angela repeats something several times during the film that sounds suspiciously like something a rapist would say. “They want this, if they didn’t want it they wouldn’t show up!” Probably trying to, at least for her peace of mind, make the workers suffering seem like their own fault. It’s however, quite clear that this is not the case.