Hill of Beans

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2012)

"Burn down the London Theatre, burn down the big Empire." - Roaring Lion ("Baboolala")
Set in Ireland, England's oldest colony, Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" takes place during the decade following World War 1. One of Loach's more mainstream pictures, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
"Barley" opens in 1920, during a spirited hockey match. Two Irish teams are playing, both of whom are then "assaulted" by the Blacks and Tans, the British paramilitary group tasked with "maintaining law and order" within Ireland. This single incident sets up the trajectory of the entire film, which pits vying Irish factions against one another whilst a British enemy looks on.
Loach then briskly sketches several big historical movements; Irish rebels are seen fighting for freedom from British rule. They succeed only in establishing the Irish Free State, a body which still falls under the dominion of the British Sovereignty. Dissatisfied with the conditions forced upon their "free state", various Irish factions swiftly pop up. Some demand ratifications to the new English/Irish credos, whilst others opt not to prod the Empire, fearful of retaliation, rocking the boat or disrupting the status quo. These Irish factions spend much of the early and late 1920s fighting amongst themselves. Loach's film focuses on both these squabbles and the birth of the Irish Republican Army. His overall point, though, is that an independent, supposedly autonomous Ireland, is nothing without socialism. Independence leads but to increased nationalist ideology, and merely propagates capitalism's social relations. For Loach, an independent capitalist Ireland is not an independent Ireland at all, but one still held in bondage.
The film revolves around two brothers, Teddy and Damien O'Donovan. Damien's you're typical Loachian working-class hero. Played by Cillian Murphy, he will not settle for the new treaties, wants some semblance of socialism, and refuses to have English bosses merely replaced by Irish bosses. Teddy, in contrast, is happy to settle for less. Damien abandons his brother and joins an Irish rebel faction which is then hunted by both the English and the new, quasi "democratic" Ireland. Whilst Damien spends most of the film as your classic Loachian freedom fighter, he does not start out this way. It is his brother who is initially the radical. Damien, in contrast, is an intellectual type who only slowly comes to the conclusion that risking one's life for half measures is to risk one's life for nothing at all. He wants socialism or nothing, the mantra of many Marxists in the 1960s.
Upon release, "Barley" was destroyed by the right-wing, British press. Critics, who spend most of their time praising reactionary films, mauled it on political grounds. The film was likened to Nazi propaganda, the Times of London associated it with both Leni Riefenstahl and Hitler and various newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch called it "pro IRA", "fascist" and "poisonous", before admitting that they "didn't see the film because one doesn't need to read Mein Kampf". The question is not whether or not "Barley" is fascist or not – it isn't – but why most widely praised art, and indeed most human beings, are not recognised as being either overtly or unconsciously fascist.
"Barley" is often criticised for its portrayal of British forces as one dimensional brutalizers. It's a blunt, cartoonish portrayal, though the general caricature is somewhat correct. At the time, this thuggery extended all the way up to Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister. Using threats, bribes and lies he forced several treaty's upon Ireland, and promised "immediate and terrible war" if the Irish didn't accept. As is often the case when Empire's propose to "benevolently grant independence", the overall plan was to partition, destabilise, split nationalist forces and then wait for civil war.
Upon release, Loach explicitly linked his film's tale of radicalism, occupation and warfare to the contemporary situation in Iraq. Bizarrely, Ireland, despite some public outcry, was fervently in support of the Iraq invasions; Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern would designate runways, troops and resources for these wars. Since the bogus Yugoslavian "interventions", Ireland has itself become increasingly less "neutral" and increasingly more a puppet of the EU, US and UK. Why has the country so quickly forgotten its own past? Capitalism has always ignored the injustices at its peripheries. Indeed, the bounties engendered by its peripheries are often precisely what support and placate the Empire's core. Or, to paraphrase Jacques Ranciere, "Londoners didn't care about slavery because the colonies were made invisible and routinely shipped home sweet bacon". The question is, when capitalism colonises everywhere, where does the periphery go?
Despite being leftist agitprop, Loach's overall narrative arc is conventional. Hollywood loves films in which "little guys" and "rebels" go up against "big guys" and "Empires", though usually it finds ways to fudge things such that the "big guy" - in the historical sense - is perceived as an underdog. Still, compared to pro-treaty Irish films like "Michael Collins", Loach is right to oppose the limiting of Ireland's nationalist movements to the creation of a capitalist state. He is also right to turn the film into a dispute between classes and not nations. Unfortunately "Barley" also possesses all of Loach's usual flaws. He can't quite capture the relationships between political and social tendencies in all their richness and complexities (neorealism is too limiting), and his reduction of class dynamics to "workers" and "landlords" is somewhat meaningless in a world in which tax money is symbiotically funnelled into the share portfolios of the very tax dodging companies which both bankrupt nations and provide amazing returns to the same. Questions of ownership are today far more complex, and society as a whole far more amorphous.
8/10 - For better "mainstream Loach", see "Bread and Roses". Worth two viewings.