Word: revolutionists
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...independence from British rule, which was then being enforced by the Black and Tans, vicious and largely undisciplined soldiers recruited from the demobilized English army and functioning in Ireland as terrorist-enforcers of the status quo. Loach's film, written by Paul Laverty, focuses on a Sinn Fein (or revolutionist) "flying column" operating in County Cork, with special emphasis on a gentle young doctor, Damien (Cillian Murphy) and his more hot-headed brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who is the group's leader. Theirs is a life of midnight raids on British barracks, roadside ambushes, betrayals, captivity (which includes brutal torture...
Disgusting, snarls his revolutionist cellmate Valentin (Raul Julia), who is being tortured to betray his beliefs and his underground comrades. But perhaps he protests too much. For he encourages Luis to keep spinning out his scenario (which is visualized in wickedly parodistic flashbacks). Ultimately Valentin confesses that his revolutionary ardor is no less a romantic fancy than Luis' old movies are. Both are substitutes for the more immediate and commonplace forms of love that elude these fantasists of impossible perfection. And both surrender to a final irony: real life may be the cruelest of all illusions, a fantasy-film star...
Matura transforms the young man from Synge's scrawny and unlikely hero into a tall, well-built leading man, played with wide-eyed charm by the aptly named Victor Love. This makes his tale more plausible if less of a revolutionist's lesson in what Everyman might achieve. Gerald Gutierrez's cunningly coarse staging provides comic turns for most of the cast, notably Antonio Fargas as a rumshop owner and Michele Shay as a lustful voodoo practitioner...
...rough, wonderfully textured weave, unlike anything one is used to brushing against in the modern cinema. The boy's chief tormentor is a trainee manager, an arrogant ninny. The figure Pelle most admires, because his courage contrasts so vividly with Lasse's discouragement, is the farm's resident revolutionist, risking all, losing all (in the film's most shattering passage), by boldly leading a short-lived revolt...
Nader is and was a revolutionist, but like too many of the current crop not quite certain what he wants to destroy and completely at a loss as to what he wants to build . . . Indefatigable in attack, he nevertheless flits from project to project, never completing any particular job and seldom going beyond the flash of publicity which keeps his name current on page one or the TV news...