The Wind That Shakes the Barley is shocking and deeply moving, thought-provoking and challenging, wonderfully photographed and passionately performed. It's also the most violent of Ken Loach's films, but the violence is necessary for the story.
The film is about the split in a West Cork family in 1920 over how independence should translate into a future Irish Republic. It isn't about the British and not directly about the partition that created Northern Ireland. This hasn't stopped all the arguments about the film, especially those coming from commentators in Britain who haven't actually seen it. The contemporary parallels with American and British intervention overseas are there for anyone draw out, but for large and enthusiastic audiences in Ireland it is the chance to learn about, and argue over, the founding of their country told through the experiences of ordinary Irish men and women. The star presence of Cillian Murphy in a Loach film is unusual but totally worthwhile in bringing this history powerfully to life.
Loach always talks eloquently about his films in interviews and it's easy to see them as his alone. However, he's the first to point out that they are all team productions. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whose work has come to define the look of a Loach film, captures the Irish landscape, the action and the vitality of the story. Paul Laverty, who first appeared as an actor in Loach's Spanish civil war picture Land and Freedom, has since written eight scripts for Loach. With Irish ancestors on his mother's side Laverty takes over from Jim Allen in exploring this crucial moment in Irish (and British) history. In 1975 Allen wrote Days of Hope in which Loach focused on three young English socialists, one of whom is posted to Ireland with the British Army in 1916. The direct connection between that film and the current one is the traditional Irish music that carries the emotional weight of resistance to British colonial administration.
Ken Loach's deserving Palme D'Or winner is a searing and powerful depiction of the Irish War Of Independence, focussing on two brothers who find themselves on different sides during the conflict. Its representation of what happens when an occupying force withdraws is clearly applicable to current events, and this is a great piece of angry political cinema.
