This could be Bosnia, or anywhere

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2008)

Films about the Irish war of independence, and subsequent civil war, are not exactly rare, and there's a scene in 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley' in which a group of irregular troops ambush an armoured car which made me want to groan, because it seems a perfect clone of an identical scene in every other movie with the same subject matter. Yet this does not mean that Ken Loach's film is entirely superfluous. Many films show how war dehumanises man, but what Loach catches brilliantly is how war can lead to people doing inhuman things while retaining a measure of their humanity, thus explaining how a peaceful community can slide into internal conflict of the most appalling kind. As such, this could almost have been a film about Bosnia, or any other place where savagery has erupted with unexpected force. As for the specific Irish politics, Loach keeps things fairly even handed, he genuinely wants you to understand how people could take both sides, although the ending stops short of explaining how de Valera's quasi-fascist theocracy emerged out of socialist rebellion. To me, this is Loach's best film for many years, because even though it explores a familiar subject, he manages to place the viewer in a less comfortable position than many of his recent works; it's never easy for us to see where our sympathies should lie. Yet it's all done with his well-established gift of empathy for ordinary people with difficult lives.