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Ken's Irish adventure
The Wind that Shakes the Barley
Directed by Ken Loach
Certificate 15
SOMETIMES being Ken Loach must be tough. He wants to make intelligent films that educate cinemagoers about his particular view of the world.
But to reach as big an audience as possible, they have to be simple and contain populist threads.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley would probably be a better film if instead of trying to tip a wink to as broad an audience as possible, the director had skipped some of the love story. It appears as an afterthought to a tale that centres around Damien and Teddy, the friends who face life and death decisions because of the struggle for Irish Republicanism, and seems to have been put in to make the film less heavy. but instead it detracts from an otherwise excellent film.
We meet Damien (Cillian Murphy, pictured), a young man whose dream is to become a doctor: he gets a place to practise at a London hospital, but before he leaves Ireland, he indulges in a raucous game of hurling.
But the feared Black and Tans – a militia formed from recruits from all over Britain to tackle the IRA – find the men with their hurling sticks after the game at a nearby farmhouse and harass them under the emergency laws that say any gathering of a certain number of people is illegal.
When one of Damien’s friends is killed after refusing to answer the Black and Tans in English, Damien’s friends beg him not to leave but to stay and fight for the Republican cause. It is not enough for him to scrap his medical ambitions – but Damien changes his mind when he watches three railway workers being beaten up for refusing to carry armed soldiers on their train and throws himself into the armed struggle.
Ken Loach likes to use actors whose faces are unknown, and much of the cast are drawn from theatre groups in Cork. He has in the past used a form of loose script where the basic outline of a scene is given to the actors and then they are told to get on with it. This works, especially in scenes where the political direction of the cause is discussed.
Damien and Teddy’s tale, the emotional and personal backdrop of their friendship and the tragic end to their relationship, makes the underlying political current more powerful.
But Damien’s relationship with his girlfriend Sinead is not widened, and unlike the love affair in Land And Freedom, which acts as a spine for the Spanish Civil War to hang from, their relationship becomes an unnecessary distraction. But this does not matter.
The script is superb – one of those rare films where there isn’t a line that makes you wince. The dialogue is perfect. Throw in the scenery, the costumes, and the history lesson and you can see why this film scooped the top prize at Cannes. |
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