The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Damian (Cillian Murphy) joins the IRA after witnessing British brutality

Herald rating: * * *

The tabloids bayed when the new film by the veteran British maverick Loach won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May. A drama set in the years following the 1916 Easter Rising, after the partition of Ireland and the birth of the IRA, it was condemned as "poisonous" by the Daily Mail and "pro-IRA" by the Sun. Yet for all Loach's anti-imperialist sympathies it is politically far more textured and complicated than that.

Certainly, the Black and Tans and the British are portrayed as monstrously violent, but we also learn that they are men broken by the horrors of the war in Europe. And more than once we glimpse a Tommy private with no stomach for his mates' brutality. Likewise, the guerrillas give as good as they get and the more explicit and harrowing sequences - including the two final scenes, which arrive abruptly and unornamented - feature acts committed by republicans on their own.

The conflict, in other words, spins out of control, pitting comrade against comrade, brother against brother. Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty are taking a wider view, looking at the way military occupation infects and corrupts the society it purports to protect. The echoes of Iraq are deafening - and deliberate.

Damian (Murphy) plans to study medicine in London but, after witnessing an act of casual and sickening brutality by a Black and Tan brigade, joins the IRA guerrilla unit of his brother Teddy (Delaney). When the IRA campaign forces Britain to the negotiating table, victory is in sight. But the terms of the settlement cause ultimately tragic divisions among the rebels.

Ravishingly shot by Loach's long-time cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, the film, which takes its title from a folk song about "the foreign chains that bind us", evokes a sense of time and place with conviction and precision. But it is drained of dramatic coherence - though not of drama - because the characters often feel more like archetypes than figures of flesh and blood. Loach is painting on a canvas of ideas (the film even has a scene, like one in the director's Spanish Civil War film, Land and Freedom, in which characters engage in a long, expository political debate) and so when tragedy and triumph befall the characters we have a sense that this is how it must have been rather than the urgent present conviction that something is happening before our eyes.

This is not to say it's a bad film, but it is never a great one. We emerge from it feeling improved, even educated, but never really transported.

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Liam Cunningham, Padraic Delaney, Gerard Kearney, William Ruane
Director: Ken Loach
Running time: 124 mins Rating: R15 (violence and content may disturb) Screening: Academy, Rialto
Verdict: A potent political drama, though more schematic and less approachable than much of Loach's work