FOR director Ken Loach, the personal is always political, the political personal. The dean of British independent filmmakers, Loach has the gift of finding the intensely moving private emotions in broad, societal dilemmas. He does that with his fine new film, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," and he does a few new things as well.
"Barley" is the only one of Loach's works to receive Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or. It is also one of the first to utilize a recognizable international star: Cillian Murphy, memorable as the evil Scarecrow in "Batman Begins." And it is only the second of Loach's 19 films (after "Land and Freedom") to be set in a politically charged past rather than a socially committed present.
Named after a poem that favored Irish independence from Britain, "Barley" takes place in Ireland in the early 1920s, a time that remains so controversial that some British newspapers savagely attacked Loach's film, even going so far as to compare the director to Third Reich glorifier Leni Riefenstahl.
But "Barley" starts quietly, with an afternoon game of hurling on land near Cork belonging to Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) and her family. Among the players are Damien (Murphy), set to begin a medical residency in London in a few days, and his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney).
Suddenly, the afternoon explodes as a platoon of gun-toting Black and Tans appears. They're thuggish British troops determined to humiliate and demean the Irish for daring to gather for any purpose at all. Things violently spiral out of control, as they do again when Damien attempts to take his train to London, and as a result the young man decides to stay and join the clandestine Irish Republican Army in its dedication to gaining Irish independence by any means necessary.
It is these sequences, as well as a brief but intense scene of British torture, that has led to the criticisms of "Barley." Though Loach makes no apologies for either, the fact that stories of colonizers acting badly are not exactly new is something the film has to overcome.
But "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish..
