Even Handed , Compelling And Loach's Best Film As Well As Being A Good History Lesson

Rating: 8/10 (4 June 2009)

This comes with a lot of baggage but we can blame the director Ken Loach for that . I do remember seeing a panel at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival where Loach had a panel publicising HIDDEN AGENDA and continually shouted his mouth off about " An army of occupation in Northern Ireland " . The bitter irony was that film had very little if any IRA bias at least in comparison to Hollywood nonsense like THE DEVIL'S OWN . Tirades like that do Loach no favour since at least two critics attacked the film for anti British bias only to be found out that they'd not actually seen the film ! Loach has that effect on people and his " socially aware realist dramas " set on housing estates are very condescending and patronising which leave him open to attack , even by people who live on the mean streets and consider themselves left wing . In short it's very difficult indeed to watch a Loach film with an open mind which is a great shame because this is heads and shoulders above anything he's made before
The producers deserve great credit as does Paul Laverty for giving material for Loach to work with . Social realism is a style that is by definition low concept in nature , " plot less " in other words . THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY isn't the most plot driven screenplay in cinematic history but it is very involving and a very good history lesson , very much better than Neil Jordan's bio-pic MICHAEL COLLINS for example . Despite showing the violence meted out to innocent Irish bystanders by the crown forces there is a very important motivation that was fairly common amongst British soldiers at the time and that was unless they were Ulster protestants Irishmen never fought in the British army . This was an erroneous though common held view and we see this stated on screen . We also see that anti treaty IRA men had no compulsion in shooting Irish Free State troops
Some critics have argued that perhaps the film might have shown violence against protestant Anglo-Irishmen that did take place the Anglo-Irish War and the subsequent civil war that followed but that's to mistake the conflicts as wars of religion when in fact they were political conflicts . In 1919 the Irish population outside the six counties of Ulster was ten per cent protestant and IRA protestant membership was a similar percentage . Perhaps the resulting civil war could have been shown as being more brutal since the Irish Free State executed more IRA men than the Brits and had no qualms of shooting anti treaty IRA men after they'd surrendered but as far as history lessons go it would wrong to criticise a film such as this