Caught Ken Loach’s latest, which won the 2006 Palm d’Or at Cannes, and was surprisingly disappointed (I like Loach’s work). It’s not that it’s a bad movie necessarily (it is, uncharacteristically, gorgeous to look at), but it is just so earnest and prosaic, pedantic even (obviously, when it comes to the Irish “troubles,” there are absolutely no shades of grey for Mr. Loach). Cillian Murphy, still too pretty for his own good, plays a young medical student preparing to leave his home in County Cork and head to London for residency training. It’s 1920–six years after the Defence of the Realm Act banned any public meeting which threatened British security–and on his last day on the Emerald Isle Murphy participates in a game of pick-up field hockey which is interrupted by the nastiest “Black and Tan” soldier this side of Voldemort. Let’s just say the British are very, very bad and the Irish “freedom fighters” are stubborn angels with dirty faces. Still undeterred (his masculinity threatened by his older brother), Murphy (and the audience) must undergo a second act of extremely distasteful abuse/torture at a train station the following day before Cillian comes to his senses, gives up his education and joins the IRA. There’s lots of fighting and blood and death and betrayal (including the 1921 signing of the Anglo-Irish peace treaty) before Murphy’s character is quickly martyred and the end credits roll. Oh yeah, there’s also a love story involving a red-headed gal named Sinead. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently watched Martin McDonagh’s absurdly comic, hyper-violent short “Six Shooter” (which takes the extreme piss out of Irish narratives like The Wind That Shakes the Barley), I might have been more inclined to buy into Loach’s overtly romanticized history play, but Barley is a film I just can’t recommend.
thanks for the spoiler warnings, jeff.
I just watched a film that has the same title but is completely different from the one that Jeff saw. This is not a film about how bad the British were/are in Ireland. The British are indeed cartoonishly bad in Loach’s depiction, but all the scenes with the British occur in the first third of the film and serve only to set up Loach’s primary subject: the ambiguity, complexity and conflict within the republican forces. What we see is the way that revolutions devour their young, that revolutionary movements always contain within themselves a tension between compromising for small gains and moral absolutism, and that the republican movement in Ireland was fatally ambiguous about how much it was a nationalist movement, and how much it was a socialist one.
The great bulk of the film traces this conflict, first within Cillian Murphy’s character as he brings himself to the point of committing to the Republican cause (in a similar manner to Jason Bourne’s moment of commitment), and then between Murphy’s character and his brother, who come to respond to the eventual negotiated peace with Britain very differently.
The scenes with the British early on are then replayed through this lens. Those who disagree with the new Irish Free State are arrested and occupy the same prison cells in which they were earlier imprisoned by the British. The burned out husk of a house occupied by Murphy’s lover — set ablaze by the British — is the scene of the final moments of the film.
So, rather than black and white, this struck me as a film that is all shades of gray. Fighting the British only opens up the ideological, strategic, tactical and personal conflicts that traverse any liberation movement. This has always been Loach’s interest, I think. He takes for granted that there is oppression in the world. The question is how we come to the point of fighting it. Think back to ‘Land and Freedom’ and you barely see Franco’s forces; you see the republican cause debating how to fight and what to fight for. The same goes for ‘Bread and Roses.
In fact, there is an almost perfect analogue to the famous scene in ‘Land and Freedom’ in which the rebel forces debate the merits of land collectivization. In ‘Wind that Shakes the Barley’ it is a debate about the legitimacy of republican courts (in those areas of Ireland that were able to carve out a tenuous autonomy from the British forces), and the extent to which military needs should take precedence over social and political needs. Loach makes clear that there is right on both sides. No one is made to sound ridiculous in order to prove a political point.
This is by no means a perfect film. It is gorgeous to look at, but it tips over into melodrama too often, and Murphy’s transformation into a dogmatic absolutist with regards to the republican cause just happens without much by the way of explanation. But what saves this film, as with most Loach films, is that he goes beyond just telling us that something is wrong with the world, to telling us just how dirty our hands will have to get if we want to put it right.
Nicely argued. Hey, we didn’t agree about Transformers either. Must be something in the water in Ohio (or Minnesota).
Being half-Welsh gives me a privileged experiential perspective from which to critique British imperialism. That, at least, is the argument I make when my students start in on the sins of British colonialism. Hence my belief in my ability to channel Ken Loach.
I think we should have a thread with the top five or ten posts we each most regret putting on the blog. My ‘Transformers’ review would be near the top of my list. Even my kids are contemptuous of it.
Does being married to a Geordie give me any privileges?
dude, you gave away the end! arrgh! (i know that arnab already said it: now that you have two complaints, how about you add a spoiler warning to your review, jeffy my dear?)
In fairness to Jeff, this film could only end in one way.
i saw the same film that chris did. it suffers from inevitable comparison to the superior land and freedom (why is it not easily available on dvd?) but is very good indeed. i agree with chris as well that creepy murphy’s transformation is not really present in any way, but i think that is my one major complaint. there is a lot of ambivalence in the film, and i think it really doesn’t paint in broad strokes at all: one of the english officers is clearly uncomfortable with torture (when murphy is beaten up in custody), even the gentleman farmer dies with dignity (and his last words have a prophetic ring to them). the irishmen themselves are a mixed bag. indeed, i’d say the one point where loach tips over into caricature is in the casting of the young free stater whose father is a capitalist–the actor and performance have “weasel” written all over them.
chris, could you say more about what you see loach saying about “just how dirty our hands will have to get if we want to put it right”? i’m afraid i saw this as a far more fatalistic film than land and freedom which was just a marvellously, rousing experience.
All I meant was that Loach seems to emphasize just how messy and morally ambiguous revolutionary change has to be. What is so powerful about his films is the absence of moral uplift that permeates most other portrayals of change. Loach is the anti-Gandhi or the anti-MLK because he never falls into the trap of arguing that revolutionary movements are distinguished from their opposites by superior morality, at least in terms of methods.
The Republican courts scene asks us to decide if it is better to be morally pure, and bankrupt, unable to buy weapons, or have dirty hands but at least be able to wage a viable struggle. At its core, after all, the movie is an argument for terrorism. Does anyone really believe the British would have made a deal (in 1920, or in 1998) in the absence of bombs going off in marketplaces killing soldiers and civilians? Painful as it may be to acknowledge, terrorism is a classic “weapon of the weak” and under-resourced liberation movements will find themselves forced to contemplate using it. In that sense, this is more fatalistic than ‘Land and Freedom’. But the compromise that Murphy’s brother makes, is surely the same compromise that the modern Republican movement made when it chose the embrace the “peace process” in 1998.
When I watched the movie I kept thinking of some lines from Brecht. I couldn’t remember them when I posted, but here they are, and they are what made me think of getting our hands dirty:
With whom would the just man not sit
To help injustice?
What medicine is too bitter
For the man who’s dying?
What vileness should you not suffer to
Annihilate vileness?
If at last you could change the world, what
Could make you too good to do so?
Who are you?
Sink in filth
Embrace the butcher, but
Change the world: it needs it!
That’s quite rousing, no?
is it a poem, or part of play? great text, either case.
It is a from a play, “The Measures Taken” but I think this passage is actually meant to be sung by a chorus!