[Socialism Today, No 3, November 1995, p. 29-30]
Lezli-An Barrett, director of the film, Business As Usual, takes a critical look at Ken Loach’s Spanish civil war epic.
Contemporary Liverpool. An old man, David Carne, suffers a heart attack. En route to the hospital, he dies. Kim, his granddaughter, sorts through his effects and begins to understand David’s life and passions. The few treasured possessions contain letters written to Kitty, his then fiancee, and numerous left-wing newspaper cuttings and photographs from the time of the Spanish civil war. There is also a mysterious bright-red kerchief, filled with dry earth. Kim begins to read the letters and slowly discovers and understands her grandfather’s life and the history in which he played a part. And so the film takes us back into a series of imagined flashbacks plotting David’s life in the militia.
1936 – At a political meeting in Liverpool, film footage shows the murderous acts inflicted on workers and trade unionists by the fascists. David and Kitty are inspired, and David decides to sign up and go to Spain. Kitty is reluctant, “I can’t spare you, isn’t there anything you can do here?” she asks. “Why you?” “Cos I can”, he replies.
David journeys to Spain and soon finds himself assigned to an international section of the POUM militia. Amongst his comrades are ex-IRA man, Coogan, and his Spanish girlfriend, Blanca. David always faithfully writes home to Kitty.
Armed only with antique rifles, they fight the fascists. They move to retake a village and in the process the enigmatic Coogan is shot. He was caught off-guard when David refused to hand over new cartridges because “there are women down there”. Just as the film begins to find life, so the director kills off one of the most dynamic characters, Coogan.
Still, the fascists strike out using the village women as shields. All hell breaks loose and, finally, after many more casualties, the village is secured by the comrades. The village, now liberated, must decide what to do with their land.
“The village debate acts to disrupt the story. The film makers could have found another way to portray the ideas involved”.
So the story is interrupted, and we have an extended sequence, filmed in the by now familiar Loach docudrama style of laboured debate. This, while containing solid educational elements about the collectivisation debate, acts unfortunately as an intermission in the story, distancing us from the protagonists. The film-makers could have found a more integrated and less trite way of portraying the ideas, which might seem disruptive to the average viewer, or oversimplified for the politically aware viewer. (Although overall, the film works very well as an appetiser to the history of the Spanish civil war).
And so the dead are buried with the powerful words: “We shall leave them in the ground, but the earth is ours”. The film continues as the section encounters arms shortages and finally, the dilemma of whether to integrate with the new government-controlled ‘Popular Army’. David naively bumbles his way through the movie, making an uneven emotional and political journey. But while he is not faithful to her, he continues to faithfully write back to the intangible Kitty.
Finally he is wounded in an accident whilst training young recruits, and he is sent off to Barcelona to convalesce. He is surprised to find Blanca waiting in his room for him when he leaves hospital. “Women are not allowed to fight”, she tells him, “new orders … I must find my place as a woman”. And as she seduces David, she continues: “I want to forget bullets, trenches
and politics, I want to feel human again”, as though these elements are intrinsically incompatible! Several fades to black later, and Blanca is angry to discover that David has joined the international section of the Popular Army. She walks out on him and he is left to discover for himself. Through the chaos and confusion it finally dawns on him that the Stalinists are betraying the revolution. An old lady walks through the showering bullets and shouts: “You should be killing the fascists not one another”. In the screening I attended, the audience applauded her sentiments. Eventually David is disillusioned and tears up his Communist Party card and returns to the militia in the villages, and to Blanca.
The question of women’s role in the Spanish civil war is skated over, as the women comrades slide compliantly from equal co-fighters, to nurse, cook and lover roles asprescribed by the new order. Blanca is finally rewarded by a curious slow motion death sequence, shot in the back when caught in crossfire at the final betrayal. We never see her face as she falls. Blanca is buried and David takes her kerchief and fills it with the soil from her burial place. ‘Dear Kitty… (for as Kitty could not spare David so Loach could not spare Kitty!) I regret nothing … We could have changed the world … our day will come, tomorrow is ours’.
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Cut to Liverpool, 1995. David’s funeral. Kim reads a poem by William Morris, Join in the Battle. She is changed by her new understanding of her grandfather, of his time, his hopes, and his desires. She pours the soil from the kerchief onto the coffin, back to the earth, back to David. Clutching the red kerchief she makes the socialist salute. Kitty, dispensed with as a story-telling device, is silent.
Despite the lack of emotional development and focus on the main characters, David and Blanca, and a simplistic portrait of the American as traitor, the film has some cracking one-liners, and moments where excellent performances are genuinely emotive. Yet Loach never seems quite sure of where to put the camera to tell a story. He positions himself and his audience at a safe voyeuristic distance. That said, Land and Freedom is more engaging than Loach’s recent titles, though there is a sense that as an emotion rises, Loach, like Blanca, walks away from it.
“Land and Freedom doesn’t leave you inspired but leaves you wanting to know more”.
An excellent story, underdeveloped by the film-makers. Land and Freedom doesn’t leave you inspired but leaves you wanting to know more about this chapter of history. Yet, a movie must for all socialists who would like an introduction to the Spanish civil war, and how it inspired such feeling and commitment internationally for a whole generation. A story rarely told on film.
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