THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY — CANNES 2006

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Irish Political Essay
Ken Loach Examines Ireland’s 1920 War of Independence
By Cole Smithey

As winner of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, Ken Loach’s film enables a look forward by looking back in time.

Set in West Cork, Ireland in 1920, the story fixes on the strife within a group of Irish freedom fighters, the IRA’s Flying Column, attempting to reclaim Ireland’s independence from Britain’s cruel Black and Tan squads occupying the land.

The formerly apolitical Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) gives up a budding career as a physician to join the resistance with his fiercely idealistic brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) whose familial and political loyalties will be sorely tested by the story’s end. It evokes a lesson that governments refuse to learn — occupied people always fight back with more at stake and nothing to lose.

After a game of "hurling," a group of Irish players arrive at a nearby farmhouse where a band of armed British troops trap them and violently demand the names and addresses of each man. One of the men, ‘Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin,’ refuses to speak English in an act of snarling defiance that soon costs him his life. Angered by the impotence of their authority by intimidation, the soldiers take Mícheál into the barn where they torture and kill him off-screen.

At Mícheál’s wake, a young woman sings Robert Dwyer Joyce’s song "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" in a voice that haunts you with its depth of poetic consciousness and reason.

The elegy, "Twas hard for mournful words to frame

to break the ties that bound us,

Ah 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 brave united men

While soft winds shake the barley," reveals an undeniable purity of human dignity and resolve that sends shivers down your spine.

Still intent on leaving Ireland for Britain to practice medicine, Damian waits at a train station where Black and Tans demand to board, in spite of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union policy of not transporting any British military personnel or supplies. The soldiers exact physical revenge on the train’s unyielding driver Dan (Liam Cunningham) and stationmaster. The episode cracks Damian’s resolve and he returns to his brother to defend Ireland rather than abandon it.

Beside Damian’s loyalty to Ireland, is his love for Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) whose family farmhouse serves as a central symbol of idyllic Irish rural life tainted by imperialism. Loach supports his anti-war theme with the human connection between Damian and Orla. The tender relationship is toppled during a gut-wrenching scene in which a squad of Tans mercilessly beats Orla while Damian and his comrades watch helplessly from a nearby hillside. Outnumbered, the men can only watch in horror as Orla suffers the humiliating physical attack. Loach is careful to keep the scene in a long shot that puts the audience at the same distance as Damian’s point of view. It’s consistent with the way that Loach refrains from glorifying violence throughout, and allows the emotions and politics of the narrative to emanate organically from arguments and situations.

Loach’s frequent script collaborator Paul Laverty efficiently articulates the goals of the resistance through fictional composite characters. Of the 11-man Flying Column group that Teddy leads, Dan is the central mouthpiece of executed socialist leader James Connolly’s progressive ideals motivated by ending oppression of the poor, rather than protecting Ireland’s national identity. Damien is quick to recognize and side with Dan’s vision for a workers’ republic that extends beyond the resistance group’s current struggle.

Laverty condenses Ireland’s struggle for independence into a series of brutal events and democratic choices that lead to the left selling out the left as a price of doing business with the British Empire. This reality is brought under a fraternal microscope between Damian and Teddy at a republican court overseen by a woman judge. A destitute woman is in debt to a local businessman who demands she pay 500 percent interest. Teddy sides with the businessman who incidentally provides weapons to the resistance, while Damien and Dan side with the old woman. When the judge finds in favor of the woman and orders the moneylender to jail until the victim is compensated, Teddy disrupts the court and rescues the man. The incident foreshadows Teddy’s alignment with limited statehood under the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty that elevates him to the status of the Tans, and bolsters him to destroy Damian.

"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" shares more than a little in common with Paul Verhoeven’s latest masterpiece "Black Book." Both films look unflinchingly inside the weaknesses of resistance movements betrayed by disorganization and greed. Ken Loach has said that his film is a small step toward the British confronting its imperialist history so that perhaps if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present.

The film is an exceptional work of vigorous cinematic art filled with dynamic performances by its all-Irish cast. At 70, Ken Loach is as steadfast a filmmaker as ever. I defy anyone who gives the film the attention it deserves to deny that it is his best film.

Not Rated. 126 mins.