Month: September 2007

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.