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The Cannes Film Festival.

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One balmy evening, at the beginning of the 2006 incarnation of the Cannes Film Festival, I walked past a beaming, tuxedoed Ken Loach in an unusually festive mood. Loach would soon win the Palme d'or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, his ambitious, but muddled, saga of the aborted Irish Revolution of the 1920's. The incongruous sight of the Marxist director, resplendent in evening clothes, seemed to exemplify all of Cannes's many, irreconcilable contradictions: the specter of a festival--largely devoted to hedonistic pursuits and held in a Riviera resort which voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen--that nevertheless featured many films, of highly variable quality, intent on challenging the political status quo.

Loach's film is also riddled with a number of intriguing, and occasionally exasperating, contradictions. The Wind employs various conventional, even hoary, ruses to drive home its radical critique of Irish history. An implicit riposte to Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, the Anglo-Irish treaty Collins signed in order to engender the Irish Free State is viewed as a humiliating blow to Irish national pride and a brutal rejection of the socialist heritage personified by the martyred James Connolly. As is Loach's wont, the film's didactic agenda finds expression in both quasi-Brechtian sequences in which the ideological nuances of the treaty debate are thrashed out and intensely melodramatic confrontations in which socialist nationalism is embodied by the scholarly revolutionary, Damien (Cillian Murphy), and the forces of reaction become crystallized within the persona of his brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney). It's unfortunate that narrative clunkiness and Manichean political judgments...