a compelling tale of the dangers of imperial dominance, how it spreads, and how political turns personal

Rating: 9/10 (21 March 2007)

The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the Palm D'Or winner, gets most compelling because of the ties that form between the political and the personal, between what is loyalty to one's country versus one's own blood and how the latter becomes almost irrelevant and taken for granted in the midst of the bickering of specifics. For a while, Ken Loach's film is suspenseful enough as a story of Irishmen rebelling against their dastardly British occupiers in militia-style tactics, practically guerrilla tactics actually, and there's not much sentimentality going on. But then when the Irish get a small sliver of independence, albeit still in servitude to the British empire, it sets off a chain reaction of infighting, of there being adequate freedom and not enough freedom, and two brothers- Damian and Teddy- get caught right in the works of it all, tragically so. Loach doesn't let either side off in this, and it adds to the complexities of the last third of the picture. Damian goes full circle as one who starts off not wanting to join the IRA, even after the death of a friend, but soon becomes more than he thought- a killer, of British as well as Irish (a troubling, tense scene where he has to take out a boyhood friend over treason)- and now sees that it's his duty to go for more than his brother settles for.
But Teddy is not put as a simple figure of a submissive Irishman completely, and the emotion that suddenly starts to boil over in his contention and eventual head-to-head with Damian helps to not make it too shallow or underdeveloped. Some critics have called Teddy unsympathetic, but it's not that easy an assertion: circumstance in the face of something that has never been attained before might seem worth it on one side, even if on the other it seems maddening. Beneath this, however all the clearer in the scenes with the British officers early in the film as a horrible brutes who will torture and kill to get control and dominance over the Irish, is Loach commenting on the dangers of imperialism, of how it becomes if not contagious then almost something that becomes accepted if seen as something that has to be taken for a little extra freedom. In the process, one can see parallels to current events, more or less, and that it's filmed in a very immediate, staggering fashion where melodrama is stripped away.
It would be one thing if Loach was making a simple message picture, and yet when it is loaded with 'message' like when the Irish argue over ratifying the treaty it's still very engrossing, but Loach is interested too in the impact on close-knit relationships: the connection with Damian and his love, who he has to watch in pain from hiding as British officers torture her and burn most of her home down; the lack in faith in institutions like the Church, connected to those in power; and finally Damian and Teddy, two sides of very courageous, yet proud figures. It would be wrong to consider that Damian and Teddy are direct representations of the two sides of the Irish struggle, those that oppose and those that support the treaty with the British, wherein the Northern part of Ireland was still indebted to England. There's more depth than that- neither of the brother's deep down really wants this, Teddy more than Damian as the film progresses despite his political convictions, as Damian, played in a very strong turn by Cillian Murphey, trained to be a doctor, not in any military or political faculty. One can't say for sure how much of The Wind That Shakes the Barley speaks to the people of Ireland of today, so many decades after North and South and the IRA have gone head-to-head, but it contains the spirit that thrives in the better war films of recent years where thought is taken as precedence over action (not that Loach is a bad action director), and the end result brings little happiness anywhere.