A classic tragedy without time or borders

Rating: 9/10 (26 June 2006)

The critics who dismiss Ken Loach as a mere polemicist tend to be the ones who violently disagree with his socio-political standpoint, and he would have good reason to feel worried if The Sun or The Daily Mail hailed the release of a Loach film with a barrage of glowing encomiums. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a companion to Land and Freedom, the study of the Spanish people's fight against powerful and totalitarian rulers, just as that struggle splits into civil war. It is specifically about British imperialism in Ireland, but it could be set in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine or of course Iraq. In the same way The Navigators depicted privatisation from the point of view of the railway workers, The Wind keeps to the level of the 'common people' - those who have to fight just to survive, and by default become soldiers. By concentrating on two brothers: young doctor Damien (Cillian Murphy) and the already-committed fighter Teddy (Padraic Delaney), Loach, by making it personal makes it even more universal. One brother, having irrevocably given himself to the struggle by killing a 'traitor' who is little more than a frightened boy, cannot give it up as to do so would be to admit that that horrible and tragic sacrifice was pointless, as it could only be justified if it led to the creation of a free republic; the other brother equally fixed in his route, but through his military experience enters the empirical world of political compromise. It leads to classic tragedy. Although the story is built on a strongly historical scaffold, the complexities of family life and a turbulent society give it great depth and emotional pull. There are no two-dimensioned goodies or baddies. The simple farmers simultaneously kill and find ways to justify their killing; the Black and Tans, certainly depicted as brutal, are angry, desperate, frightened too. Many would have been fresh from the trenches of the Great War, where they were trained to hate and kill and would be bent on revenge on the enemy; any enemy. There is another strand here, another story: these men, fighting for the 'English' empire, were protestants, many from Glasgow, to where they returned and propagated blind hatred of all 'papes', and that poison thrives today among their grandchildren. The many conflicting interests, cruelties, hopes, mistakes, inevitabilities for the Irish have also rooted in society, while they flower in melancholy and romantic bitterness on the surface. You can gauge the health of any state by looking for its critics. Loach happens to be a great film-maker but for his regular doses of the medicine we need he deserves his Palme d'Or, and we should be grateful to the French for that recognition.