Lost innocence

It seems a more innocent world in which the Spanish Civil War (1936-'39) was fought, as poignantly recounted in Land and Freedom. Not only did the international corps of volunteers underestimate the sheer ruthlessness of the entrenched powers that were their enemies, but they also underestimated their friends. Revolution has a way of turning on itself with frightening speed, as we've witnessed over and over in the years since. We seem not to have learned, however, which is why, in light of current struggles around the world, Land and Freedom's story of an opportunity lost 60 years ago remains horribly relevant today.

Land and Freedom is the first period piece by Ken Loach, the English socialist director whose films, including Riff-Raff and Ladybird, Ladybird, have focused on the plight of the contemporary working class in his homeland. Establishing a link between those present-day struggles and one from the past in which right and wrong seemed so much clearer, Loach opens the film with the death of David, a Liverpudlian senior who had once fought in Spain. His teenage granddaughter discovers a cache of David's letters and memorabilia from the war, and the story of the war unfolds in flashback.

The young David (Ian Hart, who played John Lennon in Backbeat and The Hours and Times), an idealistic, unemployed communist, hears of the fight against Franco's fascists, who ousted Spain's leftist government in a coup and joins up. Personal ideology aside, you can hardly help being stirred by the gathering together of David and a polyglot crew of similarly young and romantic idealists to fight for what they saw as a worthy cause. David is soon training and fighting among the POUM, the Trotskyist militia, in a coed platoon who make up in camaraderie what they lack in skills and arms.

Where the film may lose viewers is with the platoon's first big victory, which liberates a fascist-held village. The landowners and churchmen who supported Franco are summarily shot, and the peasants and soldiers mire themselves in a lengthy debate over whether to practice communist principles and collectivize the farmlands immediately or wait until the war is over. The politics of this exchange, however heartfelt, are arcane, if not downright dull, and they seem to stop the narrative in its tracks.

The debate does illustrate how fragile the illusion of unity is among the leftists. Later David will be disillusioned by the fragmentation that pits anarchists against communists and Trotskyists against Stalinists, with everyone accusing everyone else of betraying the revolution. The final blow comes not from the superior forces of the fascists (not only did Franco have support from Hitler and Mussolini, but also the benign neglect of Britain and the US), but from a former comrade.

David's final, hard-won insight, that "revolutions are contagious, and had we succeeded here, we'd have changed the world," puts a dubiously upbeat spin on his bitter experience. Part of the problem lies with screenwriter Jim Allen's awkward framing device. It's not clear, for example, whether David carried any of his wartime idealism into the remainder of his life, as, for example, so many American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln brigade did in the decades after they returned from Spain. The attempt to force some relevance into the war story is less convincing than letting it speak for itself.

After all, this story is timeless. In addition to the comrades-in-arms and multicultural-pals-in-the-trenches aspects that are familiar to viewers of Hollywood World War II films, there is also a Casablanca-like love story, in which David falls in love with a Spanish soldier named Blanca (Rosana Pastor) who loves another, more senior freedom fighter. David and Blanca do earn a brief idyll, but it is spoiled by the war, against which the problems of two little people aren't worth a hill of beans.

Loach's eye for earthy detail and penchant for spontaneity in actors serve him well in his shift from the household drama to the wartime epic. Maybe, as in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, this war is best recounted by outsiders with an international perspective, but Loach also never forgets that ultimately it was ordinary individuals who fought the war and brought it home with them.

More about director Ken Loach.