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THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, begins innocuously: a group of young men play field hockey, slapping each on the back after a good play. The familiar green hills of Ireland roll picturesquely in the background. Nothing in the opening scene portends the violence that will shape each of these young men into revolutionaries.
But this is 1920s Ireland, a place infested by violence, and before we have even had time to distinguish between the young men, one of them is already dead, killed by British soldiers in front of his grandmother, his mother and his sister for nothing more than refusing to say his name.
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HISTORY BOYS
Playwrights are luckier than screenwriters in at least one respect: their only limits are the limits of the audience’s imagination. How they must pity the poor screenwriter, who writes knowing that if he writes about an office, his story will look like an office. In the film adaptation of the wildly successful play HISTORY BOYS, Alan Bennett the screenwriter never quite figures out how to deal with the location selected by Alan Bennett the playwright.
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