The Revolution—Betrayed Once More: The Wind That Shakes the Barley

By Richard Porton

Given that Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley was apparently the “unanimous” choice of the Cannes jury for the Palme d’Or, it’s difficult not to be wonder if Monica Bellucci, Zhang Ziyi, Helena Bonham Carter, and Wong Kar-wai, among other luminaries, were truly captivated by the film’s convoluted account of the internecine struggles within the Irish Republican Army during the ‘20s. Or perhaps Monica et al harbour furtive nostalgia for James Connolly, the socialist revolutionary whose legacy is lovingly evoked by several of The Wind’s protagonists. It’s more likely, however, that Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty’s propensity to accompany—or if you prefer dilute—their radicalism with a healthy dose of melodrama worked like a charm on guilt-ridden liberal celebrities.

Politically audacious and formally conservative, The Wind is nearly as formulaic as Poseidon or The Break-Up. Near the beginning of Wim Wenders’s excellent Chambre 666, revived this year at Cannes, Jean Luc-Godard observes that Hollywood persists in making the same films over and over again under different titles. Similarly, it could easily be claimed that Ken Loach, often touted as an earnest antidote to Hollywood fluff, has essentially rammed home the same agenda employing disparate historical settings in three vest-pocket political epics—the multipart BBC series Days of Hope (1975), Land and Freedom (1995), and now The Wind. A devout, if soft-spoken, Trotskyist diehard, the revolution is inevitably betrayed in Loach’s historical films. At crucial historical junctures, whether the subject in question is the British General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Civil War, or the Irish “troubles” of the ‘20s, socialist alternatives are crushed and bypassed for mainstream, reactionary options.

Even if this summary seems tainted by more than a hint of cynicism, I actually believe that Loach’s commitment to unearthing the “hidden history” of the left is an important, even vital, project. And, in the wake of crude attacks on Loach by the right-wing British press (after The Wind won the Palme d’Or, the Daily Mail posed the absurd question, “Why does Ken Loach hate his country so much?”), it’s difficult not to feel sympathetic to his latest project’s overall altruism. Nevertheless, the problem with this supremely well-intentioned film lies in its insistence in collapsing historical complexity into clunky dramaturgy in which the poor, beleaguered protagonists are required to bear the weight of representing the historical zeitgeist and have little room to breathe on their own.

Laverty, who has a certain gift for crafting pungent colloquial dialogue and no gift at all for narrative subtlety or creating nuanced characters, revs up the film’s didactic motor from the outset. As Ireland veers towards civil war in 1920, the film opens—near Cork in the South—with the heinous murder of an Irish boy named Micheall (who refuses to use his “English” Christian name) by the fascistic Black and Tans, the notorious British auxiliary police. This singular act of brutality singes the conscience of Damien (Cillian Murphy), whose dreams of becoming a doctor are soon dashed by his burgeoning nationalist fervor. Damien cannot resist the entreaties of his less cerebral brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney), who is already ambushing British soldiers in guerrilla operations as a member of the IRA. Brotherly solidarity evaporates as the film reaches its climax, and Teddy pragmatically sides with proponents of the Irish Free State ushered in by the British while Damien remains true to James Connolly’s vision of an Irish socialist republic—and a vehement opponent of the treaty between Great Britain and Ireland intended to cement peace in the South.

As the British academic John Hill demonstrated in a review of the previous Loach/Lavery collaboration My Name Is Joe (1998), Loach is a devotee of the “male weepie”: while women are relegated to subsidiary roles, a male protagonist endures an excruciating crisis and is eventually both personally and politically revivified. In The Wind, male angst is diffused into two brothers with opposing political views—a Trotskyist spin on a device that must have seemed creaky when a charismatic gangster played by Jimmy Cagney feuded with his dull but upright sibling in William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931).

Putting smarminess aside for a second, it’s undeniable that Loach and Laverty are exploring fascinating historical terrain. While the film was conceived before the current fiasco in Iraq, it’s not much of a stretch to extend its lessons about colonial overreach and manipulation of democratic processes by a foreign power to Britain and the United States’s ongoing quagmire. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of The Wind is its oscillation between a mode that resembles Brechtian Lehrstucke (i.e. “learning plays”)and the blatantly melodramatic pyrotechnics that have already been noted. After Days of Hope was broadcast by the BBC in the ‘70s, Colin MacCabe, in almost rote, leftier-than-thou fashion, lambasted Loach in Screen for the supposed sin of “bourgeois realism.” Yet both Land and Freedom and The Wind court cognitive dissonance by interspersing blatantly didactic sequences with the most saccharine plot twists imaginable.

If truth be known, The Wind’s most overtly didactic moments are also its most compelling—if only because it’s tempting to admire Loach’s radical obstinacy despite lingering misgivings about his aesthetic prowess. A pivotal incident in the film involving the IRA “flying column’s” decision to kill an informer named Chris who, quite coincidentally, happens to be a dear friend of Damien offers an impeccable corollary to the quandary outlined in Brecht’s archetypal “learning play,” The Measures Taken. A Loach acolyte, writing in the British weekly Socialist Worker, maintains that this incident exemplifies “the terrible logic of guerrilla war.” Yet this “necessary murder” (a phrase coined by W.H. Auden when he was still a leftist) also clearly corresponds to the concept of “revolutionary justice” cherished by the Chinese revolutionaries of The Measures Taken—hardened men with no qualms about killing their erring comrade and burying him in a lime pit.

While Land and Freedom (written by the late Jim Allen, a wittier, if no less didactic, scenarist than Laverty) also enshrined a highly schematic political thesis, that film’s evocation of the Spanish Revolution’s alliance of Marxists and anarchists (with the conservative Communist Party, as well as Western Europe and the US, as the reactionary bogeymen) at least chronicled a tangible historical moment during which the seemingly utopian goal of working class self-emancipation was briefly realized. The Wind’s attempt to excavate a utopian kernel from a forgotten chapter in the history of the IRA seems more chimerical. James Connolly, the socialist Republican executed in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising, is still looked upon as a sainted martyr in Irish nationalist circles. Yet only a precious few of his radical descendants preserved a socialist vision of any kind. Connolly has long been an iconic figure in British radical circles; John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy’s epic Non-Stop Connolly Show was a landmark event in London fringe theater during the ‘70s. Unfortunately, by the time the impassioned rhetoric of the ‘10s and ‘20s congealed into the harsh realities of the late 20th century, Connolly’s aspirations had soured into the gratuitously unnecessary murders depicted with such vividness in Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989).

Despite all of its shortcomings, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is admirable for taking the past seriously as—in the words of E.H. Carr—“a key to understanding the present.” The unimpeachable, if hopelessly plodding, integrity of Loach and Laverty is infinitely preferable to Sofia Coppola’s airheaded trashing of history in Marie-Antoinette.
Coppola’s sense of entitlement is palpable in every frame of the film. Although her version of Marie-Antoinette as an 18th-century version or Paris Hilton is not intrinsically uninteresting, it would have been at least more provocative if the film was an all-out defense of the ancien regime. Instead, it ends up as a depthless, and quite dull, post-modern exercise. (The brilliant DP Lance Acord photographs Manolo Blahnik shoes with sensuous aplomb, but to what end?) The revolution arrives with such a whimper that the rebels are implicitly condemned as mere party poopers. This is probably an enormously unfashionable view (especially in light of the coronation of fashion plate Sofia by the chic ironists of Cahiers du Cinéma and Libération). But the saving grace of Ken Loach is his total obliviousness to fashion, as well as his unyielding, sometimes exasperating, consistency.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

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