Ken Loach’s anti-Micheal Collins if you will, not only in staking out a position on the other side of the Irish Civil War but in localising its story, refusing to have walk-on parts for the national leaders of the day. For all the time spent on the action scenes of the story – the brutality of the British, the guerilla resistance – the core of Loach’s interest lies in two scenes: one is the conflict around a Republican court operating in a town wrested from the control of the British; the other is of the political debate around the Free State treaty. With both what is at issue here is the brief possibility that existed of a true socialist republic being set up in Ireland, a possibility that quickly passed. So, the final sense of Loach’s film is a rather sombre one, a mournful regret at the loss of that possibility among so many losses of life, all epitomised in the final shot: a woman falling to the ground, her partially burnt-out home behind her, cursing her lover’s executioner, just as her lover was himself cursed (a scene reported but not directly shown) earlier in the film.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
16 Dec 2006 11:54 AM | Submit Comment
