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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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The Film File
As any aisle-hugging aesthete will tell you, the look, feel, and form of a film are just as important as its "themes." Indeed, the thematic material of a movie can no more easily be separated from the cinematic means that produce it than melodies can be separated from notes. Still, critics do it. Readers, we tell ourselves, have the right to know what a movie is ostensibly about. So I would have to say that Ken Loach's wonderful "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May, is about a savage little corner of the Irish rebellion against the British in the years 1920 to 1922; that, more particularly, it's about two brothers from County Cork who fight the vicious English counter-revolutionary force, the Black and Tans, but then part company over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State but preserved its dependent status as a "dominion" within the British Empire. One brother, Damien (Cillian Murphy), wants complete separation from the United Kingdom and a socialist revolution in Ireland; the other, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), is willing to accept the treaty as the best possible outcome for the moment. The British are gone (except from Northern Ireland), but revolutionary solidarity among the Irish collapses into civil war. There's our theme: the revolution...
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