Somewhere slightly better and more sophisticated than Footloose is Jimmy's Hall. Based on a true story about an Irish country man who opened what was pretty much a community Center that allowed the folks of the village to educate themselves in arts and entertainment, but the Catholic church was not fond of people taking any sort of education out of God's hands and into the hands of his children.

The movie really got my blood boiling even if it was very quiet and slow pace, but it hit some interesting marks about tolerance and freedom of expression. A condition needed by every human. I'm use to seeing rebellions in which people get violent in their protest, but this movie was very tamed, but more importantly, still got the message across.

My favorite part of the movie is the cool Irish music that was featured in the movie.

I like it a lot.

Ken Loach is playing on our nostalgia and with his own not to regret or make us regret the past he is describing or the misery he is depicting but to make us feel relieved that all that has disappeared. Over and over again. Film after film.

Back to Ireland in the 1930s with flashbacks to the 1920s in a countryside rural parish that is entirely dominated by the catholic church under the responsibility of an old priest who is a fundamentalist. The area is also controlled by one clan of a family of landowners who owns everything and pretends to control the life of everyone. The priest does not hesitate to call the names of those he considers are doing some evil deed directly in the pulpit: he exposes his own parishioners if he disagrees with some of their actions. The landowner has a whole gang of guards and wardens that can use violence to impose the control of their boss. And finally the nazi party is developing in Ireland and trying to impose their rules.

In fact on this point Ken Loach is very nice: during the Second World War, the Republic of Ireland and the press there, including some intellectual or writers, decided to remain neutral in the conflict between Great Britain and Germany because of their hostility toward Great Britain: let Hitler give them a lesson, was the idea. This pro- German nazi ideology was quite common and was of course founding itself on a strict fundamentalist approach of the Catholic religion as the compulsory unique unifying element of the whole of Ireland.

The film tells the story of a young man, James Gralton, when he comes back from the USA and New York in the 1930s after having been forced to expatriate himself in the 20s by the same people as those hostile to him when he comes back: the catholic church, the landowners, the politicians and all those who have a little bit of authority or power. His crime was in the 1920s to have constructed a community hall where people taught poetry, painting and drawing, music, dancing, etc, freely and where he had balls every week on Saturday nights. He cut a very narrow escape in the 1920s. When he comes back ten years later, the young people ask him to reopen the Hall, and he does.

Then the conflict is clear because James Gralton has connection with the Irish Communists and so he is considered as persona non grata from the very start. They are just looking for the good excuse to get rid of him. The occasion comes when one night in the dark some fascistic Ku Klux Klan imitators burn the hall to the ground. James Gralton becomes a menace to public order and he is banished from Ireland for life and sent back to New York on the simple excuse that he has an American passport and hence is a foreigner. In other words he is denied his native Irish nationality.

When we watch that film and try to think about the period it depicts, the poverty and the exploitation it paints and the suffering it represents for simple, poor, ordinary working people, we feel the nostalgia about this period where courage existed and where the communist ideology was bringing some hope to the poorest among "us." But the nostalgia is not meaning "That was a good time and it is a shame we have lost it!" The nostalgia is progressive: "Thanks God we have gone beyond that and left it behind: today we can enjoy our life without the constant control of the catholic church, without the dictatorship of landowners and politicians. We are relieved and reassured: that good old time is gone and gone for good and the incestuous, mostly pedophile relation with the catholic church is finished, terminated." You can get the message.

Probably Ken Loach should maybe start moving forward to the approach of social, cultural and religious problems in the present context because at the time of the Internet no organization will ever be able to prevent me to learn something and will reduce my learning to what they want me to learn only and nothing else. And yet exploitation, dictatorship and control exist more than ever. Maybe Ken Loach should start working on that theme.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

In 1933, Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward, "Songs for Amy") became the only Irish citizen ever to have been deported from Ireland when he was exiled to America without a trial. His crime seems to be that he was a Communist who incurred the ire of the Catholic Church and the landlords by daring to establish a dance hall where such sinful pleasures as community dances, singing lessons, poetry readings, boxing lessons, and political debates took place. Written by Paul Laverty ("The Wind That Shakes the Barley") from a play by Donal O'Kelly, Ken Loach's ("The Angel's Share") Jimmy's Hall directs our attention to a not very well known incident in Irish history that followed the Civil War of 1922-23, a war waged between two groups of Irish republicans over the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Partially filmed in the village of Drumsna, a village only a few kilometers from Gralton's birthplace in Effrinagh, the film begins in 1932 with Jimmy's return to County Leitrim after having lived in New York for ten years. After showing historical footage of New York during the 1930s, particularly its poverty and unemployment during the great depression, we learn that Jimmy's brother has recently died and he is coming home to support his mother (Aileen Henry) in running the family farm. In a flashback to ten years ago, Jimmy is shown pleading with his then girlfriend Oonagh (Simone Kirby, "Season of the Witch") to go to New York with him, but she prefers to remain in Ireland. When he returns, he finds her married with two children, though they obviously still have feelings for each other.

When he responds "Same as ever" to her question about how he is, she tells him that "Nobody's the same after 10 years away." Now named after Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, two martyrs of the 1916 Easter uprising against British rule,Jimmy restores the boarded-up community hall that had been closed by the Catholic Church ten years earlier, stocking it with a wind-up Victrola and jazz records he brought from New York. Once again, the hall becomes a gathering place for workers and farmers and a thorn in the side of the Church. Dances are picketed and classes disrupted, but Jimmy refuses to bend. Fearful of stoking community activism, Father Sheridan (Jim Norton, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close") stirs up his congregation by playing the Communist card and by warning his flock about the debasement of the country's morals.

"What is this obsession with pleasure?!" he demands, and asks "Is it Christ, or is it Gralton?" Railing against "the Los Angelization of our culture," the fearful pastor says that the hall has become a place where "the sins of jazz music and the rhythms from darkest Africa with pelvic thrusts may poison the minds," and reads aloud the names of those who went to the hall the previous night. Fortunately for Gralton, neither Karl Marx nor Joseph Stalin could make it. Repercussions do not take long to occur. IRA activist Commander Dennis O'Keefe (Brian F. O'Byrne, "Queen and Country") is shown whipping his daughter because hers was one of the names read aloud, shots are fired into the hall during a dance, and the hall is set on fire and burned to the ground on Christmas Eve, 1932.

The best scenes in the film are Gralton's one-on-one conversations with Father Sheridan in which he reflects on the father's outward display of hatred towards those who are working towards the common good, defying Christ's message to love thy neighbor. While Sheridan is undoubtedly the villain, the intimate talks with Gralton ultimately make a dent in his intransigence and he tells his friends that Jimmy has more courage than any of them and should be treated with respect. Though his hint of transformation is aided by a young priest, Father Seamus (Andrew Scott),it is too little and too late to make a difference to Jimmy who is arrested and, deported to America where he will live out the rest of his life.

Jimmy's Hall, like all of Loach's work, has its heart in the right place. It is well acted and filled with enchanting Irish folk music and high spirits, yet in sacrificing subtlety and nuance to score political points, it fails to come alive with real passion. The film does have an important message that is relevant to us in the present day where the concentration of wealth in a small percentage of the population threatens our democratic heritage, yet the characters are more cuddly than fiery, more one-dimensional symbols than fully realized human beings. In spite of the timeliness of the subject matter, Jimmy's Hall does not stir the blood.