The Wind that Shakes the Barley
(Ireland, 2006)
dir. Ken Loach
rating: *****
Festival de Cannes: Palme d’or, 2006
The film is a powerful, emotionally wrenching presentation of circumstances in rural Cork during the Irish struggle for independence (1919 – 1921) and subsequent civil war (1922 – 1923). It focuses on the lives of two brothers caught up in the struggle, superbly played by Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney. The fight was fraught with personal tragedy — the one brother wrote towards the end: “I tried not to get into this war, and did, now I try to get out, and can’t.”
The film remarkably gives one the sense of being present in the unravelling of violent events. The British occupation of Ireland was brutal, and the resistance had its own cruelties. Director Ken Loach is not one to romanticize, nor indulge in ambiguities.
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I received this moving comment from a historian friend:
Yes, I saw it. It seemed to me difficult to endure, dark and darker. How awful to have lived in such conditions, to have seen no way out really. I remember as a child, in London in the early 'thirties, being told of the Black & Tans by the mother of my best friend, and imagining what they were, and hearing nothing else about them from any other living soul. I remember the sense of terribleness that surrounded the expression, and that's about all. Now, as an old man, to be seeing this film, well, it seemed to me I had just opted after that childhood revelation to go to sleep for the past 70 years.
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