2006: The Wind That Shakes The Barley

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (Loach, 2006) 7/10

"'Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold united men," while soft winds shake the barley"

The above lyrical excerpt is taken from a 19th century Irish ballad entitled "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" written by Robert Dwyer Joyce. Commemorating the 1798 rebellions, the song's title additionally inspired British socialist director Ken Loach's 2006 Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Set in the early 1920's, Loach's film explores the troublesome birth of Ireland's independence movement and its association to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) milita groups which sprang up in its wake.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien, a medical school graduate, who along with a group of colleagues are subjected to humilating abuse by the "Black and Tan" regiments. Disapproving of the young men's decision to play hurling in a nearby field, the occupying army troops enforce legislation which disbars social gatherings by having the men strip and answer questions in English. Believing that one of the young men is mocking their authority by refusing to respond in the colonial tongue, the army murders the unilingual Gaelic speaker in a local barn.

Perturbed by the event, Damien becomes radicalized and abandons his medicinal work in the rural pastures of his village to join an IRA faction in town. Supplanting his academic education with courses in socialist rhetoric and guerilla tactics, Damien, his infamous brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) and a group of other similarly minded men begin to terrorize the British forces. Using their hurling sticks as mock guns, the young men escape to the windswept hillside to learn their new trade. Despite their lack of equipment, their knowledge of the terrain and their ability to garner sympathy in local villages who provide them with food, shelter and refuge.

Yet, as the IRA moves from being an underground minority to a popular people's front, attitudes and alliances shift. Families become torn and the loyalties of irascible figures such as Teddy change from starving women and children to well-to-do shopkeepers. The sweeping agenda and sense of community which marks the first half of Loach's film is fractured and the philosophical nature of national and populist conflicts and the notion of independence itself is cleverly questioned.

Using fictional characters and settings within an authentic historical backdrop, Loach inserts a micro-social realist perspective on a macro-political event. At the heart of Loach's chronicle is the ambivalance of independence and the effects of splintered ideologies on a community. In the first half of The Wind Shakes The Barley , the fictional IRA members Loach focuses upon, yearn for an independent Irish state built on socialist principles. Yet, after IRA leader Michael Collins signs a treaty with the British to create an Irish Free State, the localized factions begin to splinter internally.

Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish treaty, the Free Irish State established, while economically autonomous was still bound to the British Crown. In the eyes of the faction's more radicalized members, Collins' decision to sign the treaty is a sell-out: abandoning the class-based republican ideologies espoused at the beginning of the conflict by figures such as Damien's brother Teddy. Yet, unlike Damien, Teddy sees the treaty as a stepping stone to future independence: a fact his brother openly disavows.

This produces the film's awkward melodramatic finale, in which families are split and communities left shackled with the continued presence of class hierarchies. Loach is able to brilliantly show the subtle shifts in public decorum and attitudes promoted by the IRA members. At first they are shown as a direct opposite to the vile savagery enacted by the "Black and Tans." Their communal spirit and devotion to the cause endears them to the public and unifies them during brutal scenes of torture in dank cellars.

In a moment repeatedly referenced throughout the film, the IRA guerillas even go so far as to assassinate one of their younger members who reveals the location of the group's weapons cache under duress. When Teddy decides to jettison from the hardline leftist spectre of the group, Cillian Murphy's Damien reminds him of the sacrifice in the name of a socialist, egalitarian Ireland: expenses such as burned homes, torture, assassinations, raped girlfriends and sisters and so forth.

The familial war that emerges between Teddy's pragmatism and Damien's idealism can be seen in the heated political debates which are the crux of the film. Angered at the conduct of the Black and Tans, Damien becomes embarassed when these groups are replaced by the official "Black and Greens" Irish Free militia. In one fitting scene a group of militia men burn the home of an elderly IRA sympathesizer despite the fact as she notes she had fed and sheltered the same men when they were committed patriots in the IRA.

Throughout The Wind That Shakes The Barley Loach consciously creates parallels between the Irish crisis for independence and the contemporary conflict in Iraq. Both nations contain a foreign military influence and each sprouted up armed paramilitary groups to try to oust the occupier. In another of Loach's more recent films Land and Freedom the director has investigated the failures of leftist organizations to consolidate their influence during civil wars and national crises.

In both Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes The Barley the schisms within the socialist bracket result in a fractured and incomplete attempt to graft a new country. Relating this to the ideological differences in Iraq, Loach's film thus demonstrates how civil wars are easily started once the political sub-culture enters the mainstream. As in Soviet Russia, groups like the Trotskyists wanted to further the revolution, while others such as the Stalinists wanted to build upon what they had achieved so far.

In England, several critics have charged Loach with idealizing the revolutionaries and the ensuing process which they are participants within. Yet such a viewpoint belies the quiet nature of his underlying critique. Sent over to colonial Ireland by the British government to enforce the empire's authority following the Easter Rising of 1916, the "Black and Tan" groups are portrayed as ignorant youths and arrogantly sadistic veterans of the Great War. Loach could have possibly made these figures more opaque, but over the course of his film he shows how the IRA emerge from a class-based guerilla force into a "Black and Green" militia group. This latter group engages in hypocritical acts as brutal as the "Black and Tans" before them.

Yet, Loach pinpoints this shift early on in a dynamic confrontation between a shopkeeper and an elderly peasant woman in the Irish courts. After charging the woman extortionate rates of interest, the court orders the man to pay the woman who owes him! Outraged, the man refuses to pay and interestingly nor do IRA members such as Teddy expect him to either. Shipping in guns from Glasgow, the bourgeois shopkeeper is a key fundraiser and thus the group's original class-based rhetoric disintegrates once Teddy attempts to ignore the decision upheld by the courts. Thus, there is a line of regression within the film, which is fully realized by the emergence of two divisive camps by film's end.

Shot in green-tinted hues by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, The Wind That Shakes The Barley feels less like a historical epic and more like a historical conversation. The political sparring within screenwriter Paul Laverty's dialogue allows for some wonderful debates, although it does inhibit Cillian Murphy's Damien in the film's last hour to little more than a polemical placard speaking Marxian rhetoric as though it were colloquial speech. Additionally, Jonathan Morris editing is far too slack in the film's final half hour and Loach's handling of the fraternal histronics between Damien and Teddy is awkward. Yet, there is something endearingly poetic within The Wind That Shakes The Barley. And while there is less time for romanticized heroes and more time granted toward politics, Loach's film is accessible in its production values, fine acting and melodramatic narrative. The result is arguably one of the most politically engaging, yet restrained historical films in the past decade.

* The Wind That Shakes The Barley is available on R2 DVD through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque