Demob Happy

Shaken, not stirred

6/10

Most of the debate surrounding Ken Loach’s 2006 Palme D’Or winner seems to be concerning the historical accuracy of the plot. Whereas I wouldn’t suggest that these arguments are unimportant, it seems most critics forgot to evaluate the actual film craft: the style, acting, use of music and camerawork etc. I’m not qualified to talk about how close to the truth ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley‘ is, except to say that it hardly seems as overly biased or unbalanced as some reviewers have suggested. However, no one apparently has deigned to point out how utterly ordinary this film is. Propanganda or not, cinema can be a powerfully emotive tool but this is quite uninspiring.

While ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley‘ is shot with relative lushness, Loach retains many of the economical prinicples of his filmmaking. The use of non-professional actors and semi-improvised dialogue, for instance, feels a little lacking when grafted onto a historical context, especially where melodrama takes over. In dealing with a small-scale guerilla unit and thereby localising the history to a human drama, we needed a script and actors who can deliver. Unfortunately, the characters are not greatly fleshed out beyond the kind of shouty sloganeering that we would expect from the political meetings that they are seen to attend.

That is the nagging paradox in the `The Wind that Shakes the Barley‘, a film that is richly photographed but amateurishly dramatised. A more fully realised sense of time and place, of the Ireland the guerillas were fighting for, of their cultural and spiritual difference to the British, would have made this a more engaging piece. As what we end with is a history lesson told as hectoring theatre - a little too didactic, too wooden, and not cinematic enough. While by no means a bad film, it’s Palme D’Or win smacks a little of too much politics and not enough of filmmaking talent.