Автор: Jason Anderson

Actor Cillian Murphy and Director Ken Loach Explore Ireland's Divided Past

The story of two brothers caught up in the tumultuous events of Ireland's drive for independence in the early 1920s, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is fiercely intelligent, politically provocative and emotionally wrenching. As such, it's another great achievement in a career full of great achievements for its 70-year-old British director, Ken Loach. It's also a richer, better movie than I originally thought when I saw it one jet-lagged morning at Cannes. Its Palme d'Or win over the likes of Babel and Volver isn't so surprising after all—indeed, the award is a testament to the skills of the seemingly indefatigable Loach, as well as the abilities of the movie's star, Cillian Murphy.

Both principals seem understandably satisfied with their accomplishment as they discuss the film's creation and its healthy—if, in some quarters, heated—reception during two separate interviews. (Murphy was in town during TIFF last September; Loach braved the early-March cold snap recently to promote its Canadian release and a retrospective at Cinematheque Ontario...) For Murphy, this was an invaluable opportunity to work with a director whose methods often bring the best out of his actors, professionals and neophytes alike. Yet it wasn't some canny agent who united the young Irish movie star and the British master of social-realist cinema—it was a matter of geography.

"The only reason I got an opportunity to work with Ken was because he decided to make a film in Cork and that happens to be where I'm from," says the 30-year-old Murphy, who had breakout parts in 28 Days Later…, Red Eye and Batman Begins. "He only hires actors who are from the region [where he's shooting] because he wants to make his films as authentic as possible. As somebody who loves film, I was very, very aware of Ken and jumped at the opportunity to audition for him."

Murphy ended up playing Damien O'Donovan, a young doctor who joins his older brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) in the guerrilla war against the occupying British force trying to stymie Ireland's independence movement. The confrontations between the O'Donovans' flying column of country boys and the British "Black and Tan" militia squads are marked by a shocking level of brutality. But from the horrors of this dirty war emerge exciting possibilities, and the increasingly left-leaning Damien recognizes the potential for a more radically transformed Ireland. "Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build?" says Loach, who'd wanted to make a film on the subject since the early '70s. "There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, 'Let's just change the flag and keep everything as it was.' Then there are the revolutionaries who say, 'Let's change the property laws.' It's always a critical moment."

Loach believes this process was scuppered by the execution of socialist leader James Connolly in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising. In the years that followed, "some of the other labour leaders consciously took a step back," says Loach, "so the possibility of big things happening was really gone. But there were obviously people around who still had those ideas in their heads."

Those ideas get an airing whenever the characters vigorously debate their positions: The Wind That Shakes the Barley may be the first war film in which the post-battle conversations are as heated as the fighting. Yet those ideas were largely written out of Ireland's history. Indeed, Murphy says that he learned more in school about the more heroic events of 1916 than this bitterly divisive period. "It's very complex," he says, "and the civil war in particular was not a glorious time for Irish people." As he researched his role, Murphy learned more about how the conflicts affected his own family: "My grandfather was shot at and he had a cousin who was killed by the Black and Tans."

"Every family's got its story," says Loach. "And with every field you go past, people say, 'That's where we chased three Tans' or 'That's where so-and-so got shot.' There are memorials everywhere. It's very present in people's minds."

Conversely, it hasn't been present at all in Britain, the subject of Ireland being notoriously sensitive. That's why some viewers were so alarmed by the thuggish behaviour of the Black and Tans and the atrocities recreated on screen. A veteran of many skirmishes with the U.K. press, Loach was still surprised by the ferocity with which the film was greeted in some quarters.

"The aggression from the British right wing was amazing," he says. "I was compared to Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist. Somebody in the Telegraph wrote that he hadn't seen the film and didn't want to because he didn't have to read Mein Kampf to know what Hitler was like." Loach seems especially awed by that one.

Yet the director points out that the savagery the British displayed in Ireland was hardly unusual. "The British have been pretty savage everywhere they've been," he says. "Geographically, Ireland is very close to us so it seems more appalling, but we did terrible things wherever we colonized. Thirty-odd years later in the 1950s, there was terrible butchery when the Kenyans fought for independence. Behind the elegant mask of the British ruling class, there's a vicious beast underneath."

Murphy argues that accusations that the film is anti-British are unfair, saying that what it really rails against is the British establishment of the time and their policies about the emerging Irish nation. "People who have said that have yet to contest any of the [British] atrocities carried out in the film because they were based on facts," he says. As for the charge that it glorifies the IRA, Murphy notes that the original IRA was very different from the many breakaway organizations that developed in the decades that followed. He says that this early incarnation really was "what the letters stood for: an Irish Republican army."

Moreover, the scene in which Damien executes a young informer whom he's known since childhood is hardly a glorification of violence. What Loach calls the "remorseless logic" of war takes a terrible toll on both O'Donovans.

That The Wind That Shakes the Barley has caused such consternation is also a result of its raw immediacy. Even when working with a period story, Loach's methodology yields startling results. Murphy explains that he wasn't given a complete script and worked only from scene to scene, as is usually the case for Loach's casts. "All I knew was I was playing a doctor who was one of two brothers who had become involved with the struggle," he says. "We shot everything chronologically and as the story unfolds, I learned as the character learns. That was quite scary but also exhilarating. You don't have the safety net of poring over a script for hours and making intellectual decisions about how you're going to behave. You were stripped, really, of all your tricks as an actor."

Loach notes that the method seems to work, having used it for most of his career. "You want to find people who are really quite close to the characters so when they reveal themselves, they reveal the characters as well," he says. "You can catch people off guard and it still fits. Also, we've usually done quite a lot of preparation work so that people know their characters. It's not about playing tricks on actors; it's enabling them to be as good as they can be."

This process makes the history in The Wind That Shakes the Barley feel alive, often terrifyingly so. The continuing relevance of these events is indisputable. Loach calls the partition of north and south "a scar across the country, which is just not healing." There's been encouraging news over the last few weeks in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein and Democratic Unionist politicians are warily embracing the possibility of working together.

In the meantime, the prolific Loach is readying his next feature, These Times. (As for Murphy, he'll next be seen in Sunshine, a science-fiction thriller by the 28 Days Later… team of writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle.) The combined effect of the Palme d'Or, The Wind That Shakes the Barley's box-office success in Europe and the occasion of Cinematheque Ontario's retro is to affirm Loach's position as one of world cinema's greatest talents, and perhaps its most fervent humanist. Yet he's disinclined to see his career as any kind of noble mission.

"You just stagger from job to job, really," he says, laughing, "and just hope to be still standing at the end of the week!"