There's a question to be asked regarding intensity in film. When making a movie that is brutally emotional as well as violent, how much can the human mind take in the span of two hours? For the most part movies need a reset, brief scenes of levity or calm between mind-bending terror or emotional trauma. An emotionally traumatic movie like Blue Valentine ingeniously uses flashbacks of happiness and love to offset the degradation of a present marriage. We are happy when Dean and Cindy are; it also has the added effect of making their present scenario all the more heartbreaking. A violent movie like Children of Men bookends that violence with the strong bonds of family. So what happens when we leave out the reset button, when all we are left with is trauma after trauma until we are left huddle in a corner wondering when or if the sun will shine again? We are left with The Wind that Shakes the Barley.
It should be said that the history of Ireland and England after WWI is an intense and heartbreaking one. I won't summarize the whole thing, which starts with an insurrection in 1916 and (roughly) ends with an assassination in 1922, but needless to say it was a devastating time filled with imperialism, arrogance, power politics, bloody backstabbing, and friends turning on one another. It deserves a whole list of serious films exploring every aspect of the war of independence and subsequent civil war (and that list exists, Michael Collins being a great starting point).
Set at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, The Wind that Shakes the Barley follows two brothers who become immediately involved in the Republican Army in its attempt to expel British occupancy. The film opens with Damien (Cillian Murphy), a doctor who has accepted a residency in England, and his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) witnessing a brutal murder of a seventeen year-old boy by British soldiers after a field hockey match. The scene is loud and aggressive. It sets the tone for a film that cannot back down from its opening scene. Retaliation upon retaliation unfold and as they do the complicated politics of war unravel with it. Sides are chosen and ultimately the film ends as tragically as the Irish Civil War did.
But what makes this movie so special is the deliberate pacing of the movie. There is no turning back from a boy's death, and director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty leave very little room for peaceful moments: houses are burned, women tortured, and priests cursed at their pulpit. Yet in spite of this the aggressive intensity in no way diminishes what are clearly the two most emotionally jarring moments of the film. The fact that they are odd mirrors of each other no doubt enhances their magnitude, but when you finish the movie you push everything else to the side, focusing almost solely on two triggers and one letter.
What the pacing does do is create an agitation that never allows for comfort. It plays with our expectation of what a film should be. Watch intense movies enough and you begin to understand the unwritten contract: loudness followed by quiet. The Wind that Shakes the Barley plays with the volume until your mind wrestles with the want for quiet and the need for loudness. There is a brief respite between the cease-fire and the beginning of the Civil War, but at this point your brain is trained to disbelieve joy and wait for sorrow.
If the movie wasn't so good this would be a cheap trick, and if the ending wasn't so desperately gut-wrenching it probably wouldn't work. But the demise of Teddy and Damien, brothers who once stood their ground together and later chose differing politics, makes for an ending not easily forgotten and one that left me in the fetal position in the corner of my room, waiting for and wondering about that damn sun.
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