Directed by Ken Loach

Starring Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham

‘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 rugged, rocky wilderness of County Cork backdrops scenes of sudden violence and ambush. It’s 1920 in Ireland, and a rag-tag band of freedom fighters are hell-bent on expelling the British from their Emerald Isle. It’s no wonder; early scenes in the film show the “Black-and-Tans” (British soldiers) treating the Irish natives as something less than human.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien O’Donovan, an intelligent and earnest young man ready to leave Ireland to study medicine at a London hospital. But when Black & Tan bullying turns into mindless murder, the tragedy is a catalyst for the county’s young men, including Damien and his older brother, Teddy. They decide to organize a resistance to the British occupation, relying on guerilla tactics to surprise the better-trained, better-equipped British.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, arguably the most prestigious award bestowed by the high priests of international cinema. They chose a worthy, sober-minded film; the kind that one approaches with respect rather than love.

The director, Ken Loach, has no interest in appealing to your emotions. There is no grandstanding in the film; no mawkish tugs on your heartstrings. There are no picture-postcard landscapes, lyrical set-pieces, or stirring action scenes. The music, mood, and color palette of the film are muted, earthy, unvarnished. The shoot-outs between the IRA and the British are deliberately clumsy, confusing, and strangely intimate. When an Irishman falls, he’s someone every fighter knew by name, may have known their whole lives.

Just as he refuses to supply formulaic action scenes, Loach also refuses easy answers, pat themes. Loach frames the larger questions of the conflict within a family drama. Damien and Teddy, blood brothers-in-arms who had fought together for the same free Ireland, eventually diverge in their ideology. The Treaty of 1921 called for a truce between Britain and Ireland with the establishment of the Irish Free State, which remained nonetheless a dominion of the British Empire. Teddy, a politician, supports the treaty as the first small but necessary step towards an entirely independent Ireland. Damien, a purist, believes the treaty to be a compromise, an insult to everything Irish soldiers fought and died for.

Which brother is correct? The defining moment for Damien already happened earlier in the film. On an isolated windswept heath, Damien executes a fellow Irishman, a young stableboy who had betrayed Teddy to the British out of fear for his family’s safety. Murphy does brilliant work in this scene as ideology battles humanism. “Have you said your prayers?” he asks the boy, his voice trembling with fear for his own compromised humanity.

Damien’s absolutist belief in freeing Ireland from British rule seems rooted in this moment. From that decision on, the sensitive young man who had wanted to heal others has to justify to himself that the Cause was above the life of a fear-stricken boy. No compromises with the British could allow that to be true. Murphy was the right choice for the part; with his icy blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones, he has the ascetic intensity of a man marked for martyrdom.

Later Damien must tell the mother of the boy what he did to her son. She insists that Damien to take him to the grave. They walk for six hours in silence. Once arrived, she lays flowers and a cross on the grave and tells Damien, “I never want to see your face again.”

Naturally any film set in Ireland circa 1920 is shot-through with Catholicism, but Loach—a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist—is less interested in religion than in the socio-economic needs that drive the revolution. There are cosmetic nods to the characters’ faith, such as the sign-of-the-cross over a fallen comrade, but religion for the most part remains in the background.

Nonetheless, The Wind that Shakes the Barley raises difficult and necessary questions about the nature of political ideology in a human context. Loach has been accused in the past of using his films as unsubtle vehicles for his socialist agenda. Not having seen his other films, I couldn’t comment on his oeuvre, but this particular film struck me as essentially humanistic. Consider the anecdote Damian relates about the mother of the boy he killed. And then consider the last line of the movie. Loach is not afraid to make clear the tragic human cost of pitiless political purity.

USCCB rating: A-III – Adults only

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Posted by John Murphy on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm.