Timing is everything. What then should we make of Ken Loach’s War Of Independence drama, appearing when fashionably right-wing punditry rules our media and the vast majority of the population seem content to sweep our republican and socialist history under the carpet?
Well, we ought to be delighted. Lessons from history can only be a good thing and Loach’s fine-looking Palme D’Or winner works hard to include every possible perspective on the War Of Independence. If anything, Paul Laverty’s script occasionally groans beneath with the writer’s scholarly desire for inclusiveness and fair play.
No matter, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is as elegantly formed as it could be in the circumstances. Bearing little resemblance to the Trotskyite, Brit-bashing manifesto described in certain English and wannabe English newspapers, the film makes it clear that the Black and Tans, though terrifically brutal, are recently returned from the Somme. Later, an Anglo-Irish landowner warns a flying column, with barbed prescience, that if they win, Ireland will become a ‘priest ridden backwater’. Most importantly, all sides in the civil conflict are granted airspace, humanity and inhumanity.
The film’s protagonist Damian (Murphy) is, initially, a reluctant rebel. A medical student in rural Cork in 1920, the horrific actions of the Black and Tans inspire him to abandon plans to work in a London hospital and join his brother Teddy (Delaney) in an IRA cell. Idealistic scenes depicting military training with hurling sticks and the elation of revolutionary spirit soon give way to harsh reality. Damian finds himself the triggerman when a childhood friend is discovered as an informer and once the treaty is signed, he cannot accept its compromises, turning him against his own pro-Treaty brother.
Why should he swear allegiance to the crown, Damian pleads. And surely swapping British soldiers for their Free State equivalents only protects the same landowning status quo? In Mr. Loach’s film, the real tragedy is the fledging state’s necessary compromises with the Church and the bourgeois classes. It doesn’t matter what people voted for in 1918, the winners will always win.
The director himself has drawn parallels with the conflict in Iraq and to some extent, The Wind That Shakes The Barley mirrors the internal strife and cruel imperialist presence of that troubled nation. Mr. Loach’s precise social realism lends flinching horror to a torture scene in a British Army barracks, while echoing pictures from Aru Ghraib. From an Irish perspective, however, it is impossible not to think of, oh, say, Shannon, and that we’ve traded one lot for another.