The Wind that Shakes the Barley - a Time Out review

(Key events revealed)

The title of Ken Loach's new film is also the name of an Irish folk song that marks a key, early moment in his drama. We're in the Irish countryside in 1920 - a farming village in County Cork, to be exact - and British troops, a band of 'Black and Tans', have just murdered Micheail, a young Irish man who refused to speak his name in English after his arrest for playing an illegal game of hurling. Loach cuts to Micheail's funeral and the lad's body, his head propped up with a crude block of wood, lies in his family's cottage, ready for burial. His family and friends gather round, and together they sing in low voices the words of 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley', a song that mourns 'the shame of foreign chains around us'.

It's not an historical event. Nor is Micheail a politician, a particular hero, or even a character with whom we've spent more than five minutes. Instead he's a fictional, anonymous rural labourer invented by Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty to represent the brutality of the military (many of them fresh from WWI) in Ireland at that time, when the British government was faced with a violent republican movement operating in the wake of the Easter Rising of 1916.

Loach's aim is to turn the political into the personal - to spin national pain into local tragedy - and Micheail's death marks the politicisation of the film's main character: Damien (Cillian Murphy) is a friend of the dead man and a doctor who's about to move to London but who instead decides to join his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) in a guerrilla unit - a 'flying column' - of the Irish Republican Army. For a significant part of the film, we follow Damien, Teddy and comrades as they wage a small war on British troops in their area. An engaging, ensemble cast of Cork actors (and one Dubliner, Liam Cunningham) serve Loach very well, barren Cork locations lend authenticity to the drama, and the accents and dialogue are credible and enjoyable.

This is not a celebration of terrorism - as some commentators have implied - but rather a considered comment on what drives ordinary men and women to politics and violence. It's cloaked in a terrible sadness, not glee. The mood is anything but triumphant. I'd even say that Loach's desire to document plainly - never to glorify - the IRA's actions accounts for some of the film's few flat moments (moments which may also be explained by the production's small budget and perhaps even our conditioning by other, more bombastic war movies). Loach certainly plumps for the republican cause, but his presentation of their actions is complex and balanced. That Damien and his comrades are driven by historical forces is stressed in a devastating scene in which they execute a traitor - a friend - among them. That their actions are as vicious as their counterparts in the Black and Tans is made clear when they march Sir John Hamilton (Roger Allam), a British landlord onto a windswept hillside and assassinate him.

Beyond the human cost of history, Loach has another interest: the projected, disputed and failed plans for an independent Ireland that was also socialist. Damien declares, 'I hope this Ireland we're fighting for is worth it,' and in a prison scene, Damien and his IRA colleague Dan (Cunningham) reminisce romantically about their shared following of the executed republican socialist James Connolly. In a later scene, before the film tips into the devastation of civil war, a group of republicans, including Damien and Teddy, debate their future course of action - whether to dispute the Irish Free State treaty of 1921 or to lay down their arms. If such scenes feel like political debate made real, that's exactly what they are: how else could a civil war come about other than through heated argument? It is in these scenes too that Loach demands real engagement with the ideas of the period.

The film ends with death, personal and political. Families are broken. The socialist dream has failed. Here, as in Land and Freedom, Loach captures a moment when a united left could have led to freedom and socialism. There's nothing disingenuous about Loach's aims. He's a socialist; he's a critic of oppressive governments; he's concerned with the politicisation of the people; he's a chronicler of lost political opportunities. His argument - whether you agree with it or not - is clear and honest. All that's come before in Loach's work comes together again in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a stirring lament for good human beings caught in the crossfire of history.

Ken Loach interview, Cath Clarke, June 2006

He discusses the negative press reaction to the Palme d'Or winning The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

'Why does Ken Loach loathe his country so much?' was the question put by the Daily Mail last week after the director's new film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Set in 1920s Ireland it charts the struggle of the Republican movement for independence against the British and the subsequent civil war. The Sun branded it 'the most pro-IRA film ever', and the broadsheets weren't much kinder. Even Loach's triumphant punch as he accepted the prize came under the scrutiny of a Guardian columnist who wondered whether it was perhaps a communist salute. It's been quite a savaging for the first British film in ten years to take one of the industry's most distinguished prizes (the last UK Palme d'Or winner was Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies in 1996).

Ken Loach Talking in his Soho office, Loach describes the backlash as 'vicious' and 'contemptible' - though not unexpected. 'It's not worth giving a considered reply to because it's right-wing rant, which I expect from The Mail and The Sun. The fact that The Sun says it's a "must not see film" should encourage everyone to see it.'

So what's been causing the fuss? An early scene in Loach's film shows the tranquillity of rural Cork disrupted by a unit of Blacks and Tans - the mainly demobbed British First World War soldiers operating in Ireland. The unit arrests a group of lads for plwhen aying banned Irish sports, and when one boy refuses to speak his name in English there is a scuffle and he's taken into a barn and beaten to death. There are later scenes of torture and soldiers shooting at unarmed civilians. Anti-British? Not according to Loach. 'We could have made it much worse about the British. But there's so much more to say.'

Boxes are piled high in Loach's office - he's having a clear-out - and their yellowing labels identify correspondence dating back to the 1960s, a testament to a career that now spans 40 years, from Cathy Come Home and Kes in the 1960s to his recent Glasgow trilogy.

'The Troubles' are not new territory; in 1990 he made Hidden Agenda, a fictional account of the collusion of the security forces in the murder of a civil liberties campaigner. The Wind that Shakes the Barley is fiction too, though Loach defends its historical accuracy and points out that none of the criticism levelled against the film has accused it of fabricating the facts. 'Not one of them has said that one thing in the film is false.'

The chief interest in Loach's new film are the radicalised young men who join the ranks of Irish Republican Army volunteers. They include Cillian Murphy ('28 Days Later…', 'Batman Begins') as a doctor set to leave for England, but who stays to fight in the IRA. He joins a unit ambushing British army barracks and motorcades, alongside his brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney). British terror is met with Irish terror, with reprisals on both sides escalating. After the divisive truce and partial independence of 1921, Loach follows the splintering of the Republican movement and its descent into civil war.

Loach dismisses the accusation that he made the film as a direct comment on the Iraq war, a claim made in the Mail and elsewhere. He says that he and his long-time writing partner Paul Laverty had been thinking of a film along these lines for over a decade. 'But it's always relevant,' he explains. 'There's always an army of occupation somewhere, and a place where people are trying to get their independence and the right to democracy. At the moment, the occupation is in Iraq.'

The fact that the film was part-funded by lottery money, care of the UK Film Council, to the tune of £545,000 (out of a total estimated budget of £4.5 million) has further irked some. 'That really gets up their nose,' Loach says smiling. As with all his recent films, funding is a complex business, with a handful of European distributors all contributing to the coffers. Loach has always been better received on the continent than at home - both commercially and critically. Few British critics at Cannes were tipping The Wind that Shakes the Barley for the top prize. Instead, all eyes were on Volver, the new film by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.

Critics here regularly accuse Loach of being preachy, banging the political drum or, maybe worst of all, lacking subtlety. It's often said that while the man is to be respected, his films are rarely to be enjoyed. (The vitality and unexpected breadth of life in Loach's film are perhaps overlooked, from Robert Carlyle's romance with a Nicaraguan exile in Carla's Song to the experience of Hispanic janitors in Bread and Roses. His films can be funny too - Ricky Tomlinson is vintage in Riff-Raff) For his part, Loach is a vocal critic of the critics, and dismisses most of his detractors as right wing and preoccupied with style and technique over content, 'they're all Thatcherites at heart'.

While his thinking may be radical - or firebrand, to borrow the tabloid lingo - Loach is considered and modest in person. Talk to him, and there is none of the tub-thumping with which he is often charged. The actress Eva Birthistle, who was in his last film Ae Fond Kiss describes Loach's manner as 'vicar-like'. As he turns 70 - the Times disparagingly referred to him last week as a 'pensioner from Nuneaton' - Loach is about to embark on one of his most ambitious films yet: These Times (again written by Laverty) will be a contemporary story set just outside London. It's not an easy project. Loach's search for authenticity, often casting non-professional actors, is no mean feat in a city of 7 million. But the director is clearly excited: 'Everything that's going on in the world is represented somehow in London.'

And what about the small matter of the Palme d'Or? How did it feel to collect the top prize at the world's most important film festival? He explains how his moment of glory very nearly turned into farce. 'There was a tricky moment where I stood on Emmanuelle Béart's dress, and she started to move away. I had a picture of toppling over into pink chiffon, of us both collapsing.'

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