Arresting resistance

>> The politics and violence in 1920s Ireland mirror today’s conflicts in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley

BAND OF BROTHERS: Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney

by MARK SLUTSKY

You don’t need to spell out why a film about the politics of occupation, violent resistance and the grim feedback loop produced by the two might be of interest to the 2007 filmgoer. The latest from British filmmaker Ken Loach, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is set nearly a century ago in the period of sectarian violence in Ireland following the Easter Rising and the First World War. Its obvious parallels to Iraq, or Israel, or anywhere else in a similar state of turmoil, caused an outraged reaction in England when it was released there last year. (The film was better received in France, where it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.)

This is, after all, a film about the birth of the IRA, and one made with no small amount of sympathy—and nuance too. Opening with a startling scene where Irish youth are brutalized by the notorious British Black and Tan forces responsible for policing the country in that era, The Wind That Shakes the Barley follows two brothers, Teddy (Padraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy), who are caught up in the conflict.

Teddy is a member of the nascent IRA as the film begins, while the less demonstrative Damien is about to leave for London to study medicine. Seeing the Black and Tans in action, though, is cause for a change of heart in Damien, who remains to fight alongside his brother and their companions. This part is simple enough: it’s the Irish versus the English, the occupied fighting their oppressors.

But simply making a film glorifying the IRA’s actions during this era would be a grotesque and misleading over-simplification, and it’s after the Anglo-Irish peace treaty of 1921 is signed that the movie gets to its real and vastly more complicated subject. Some welcome the truce and the establishment of an Irish Free State, while others reject it as a compromise that will allow the British to retain control in all but name.

Convenient for the film’s dramatic arc, that split happens to run right down the middle of our two brothers, though not necessarily where you’d expect. The mild-mannered Damien turns out to be the more radicalized of the two, still willing to prolong the fight, while Teddy welcomes the peace and joins the new Irish security forces. As the violence increasingly occurs between the Irish, brother literally turns against brother—get it?—with predictably heartbreaking results.

All that makes the movie sound a little more preachy than it actually is. There’s no denying that Loach has made a very didactic film, and one with a clear political aim. But the naturalism of the acting (Murphy is particularly fine) and the film’s beautifully created, authentic atmosphere overwhelm its open tendentiousness. While the characters aren’t portrayed with the same sort of heroics and histrionics they might be in another director’s hands, Loach’s directorial restraint feels entirely appropriate here. Oddly enough, the slight dramatic detachment gives the movie a sense of intimacy. It’s moving but not melodramatic

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
opens this Friday, March 16

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