The Wind that Shakes the Barley

The Relay has been watching a lot of movies this summer and fall, mostly good ones, as is the benefit of Netflix and reviews. I’ve decided to go back to my writing roots from the early days of my learning to be a critic when I thought the greatest job in the world would have been to write for Rolling Stone, and start doing some contemporary reviews of whatever I have come across. Self-indulgent, to be sure, but it will keep me writing. Thus, I begin Monday Morning Critic.

This weekend, I saw a most extraordinary movie that received almost no attention in America, despite (or maybe because) it won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for 2006, because it is a small, independent, European-produced film. It is The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and it is the best film about Ireland I have ever seen (sorry to those Darby O’Gill and the Little People fans).

The film is about the Irish Civil War and the time leading up to and following the formation of the Irish Free State in 1920. It is an intensely personal film that portrays a story of two brothers in the Irish Republican Army and the impossible situations and decisions that the Irish conflict wrought then, and continues to rend, that nation.

The movie is by Ken Loach, a Brit who is one perhaps the greatest contemporary filmmaker that no one in America has ever bothered to learn about. This is most likely because his films have always been small, low-budget, and decidedly political movies. Loach has made a career of making films about the lower, working classes, and he has always remained true to his leftist convictions, refusing funding and distribution by the big companies, almost always hiring unknown non-actors for his films, and shooting them almost documentary-style. Even though all of his films are in English, some have also been standardly subtitled in English because of the authentic local accents employed by his actors. That strategy, by the way, may help with The Wind that Shakes the Barley as well—I recommend that the novice to country Irish turn on their subtitle option.

What is most compelling about The Wind that Shakes the Barley, for me, is the questions that it inevitably arises about all situations of resistance and revolution. What does it mean to be free? What are acceptable means of achieving goals of political struggle? When and in what form is violence justified? Watching this film invites the same sort of introspection raised by the American Civil War, and today in Iraq. It has a decidedly non-American cinema ending. And I think its brilliant.