One Paragraph Movie Review: Freedom For us

One hundred and sixty-first film: A Nous la Liberte, or ‘Freedom For Us’, a 1931 French film that doesn’t know if it’s a silent film or a talkie, but does know it’s charming as all buggery with its use of humour to deliver thinky messages without preaching. Its main premise is ‘hey, look how much modern industry is like prison’, its secondary premise is ‘hey, look how much better it is to be friends than to be rich’ and it’s all delivered in the middle of expansive art deco sets and almost-slapstick grumpiness. The depiction of automated production lines and precursors to digital stock ticker displays are almost exclusively improvised using moving strips of fabric, and one of the main characters looks like a portly French 1930s George Clooney, which all just gives this thing a big bunch of heart and my moderate affection. It’s good, the frocks are nice, and rich blokes are buffoons, BUFFOONS I tell you. Almost three state-of-the-art phonographs out of five.