LAND AND FREEDOM Movie Review

In her great 1989 documentary American Dream, Barbara Kopple chronicled a grueling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant and showed how the strikers were constantly in danger of losing their war because they fought so many small skirmishes among themselves. It's not a new syndrome, and it crops up as the central issue in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom, his riveting portrait of division among the left during the Spanish Civil War. Loach's film has much of the immediacy of a documentary, but it's a well-crafted narrative about a young British man (Ian Hart) who volunteers to fight Franco for a host of romantic and idealistic reasons. As he gets further into complexities of what he originally perceived to be a simple case of good versus evil, he comes to see that division within his ranks may well be the most formidable impediment to victory. A long sequence in which the fighters debate seemingly minor political points demonstrates—rather agonizingly—that with so many agendas active and so many individual and incompatible goals at play, the identity of the “enemy” became maddeningly unclear. Some of the film's melodramatic sections—such as a predictable romantic subplot—feel like forced, obvious padding to create a more “human” story. But overall, Land and Freedom is a valuable and fascinating look at why even the best-intentioned political movements seem to often do their damndest to try and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

NEXT STOP … The Good Fight, American Dream, Raining Stones

1995 109m/C GB SP GE Ian Hart, Rosana Pastor, Iciar Bollain, Tom Gilroy, Frederic Pierrot, Marc Martinez; D: Ken Loach; W: Jim Allen; C: Barry Ackroyd; M: George Fenton. Cesar Awards '96: Best Foreign Film; Nominations: British Academy Awards '95: Best Film. VHS PGV