“David” (Ian Hart) is stuck in Liverpool in the late 1930s with little by way of prospects, so he decides to go and fight for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He readily makes friends and is soon joined up with POUM, a collection of Marxists where he encounters “Bianca” (Rosana Pastor) and discovers quickly that this is a brutal conflict. His ‘side’ are united in their intellectual detestation of fascism, but thereafter he soon discovers that there is little else that glues this disparate group of communists together and after he is wounded, he heads to Barcelona where he finds even less satisfaction amongst an urban militia whose agenda is just as pragmatically conflicted as it is dogmatically joined up. What else to do but to return to his original group, but with the war rapidly coming to a conclusion and him realising that uncomfortable compromises are having to be made, is there any future for him here or might he just try to make it back home? Though this film is undoubtedly trying to make a statement, I found it to be completely devoid of nuance or characterisations. The theory of the friend of my enemy is my friend seems to be the mortar that underpins their battle plan, and yet it becomes clear that these people soon stop fighting for “the” cause and start fighting for “a” cause, In fact, it could be “any” cause that suits their generalised opposition to anything that isn’t to the left of Stalin. Indeed, the Soviet lack of commitment to their cause would suggest they might have been too extreme, or out of control, or possibly it was their total inability to contemplate compromise or conciliation that might have deterred them and just about anyone else from supplying them with arms or victuals. The message here labours the solidarity of the “left” as though it is some sort of unified holy grail of human existence, but just like that fabled object it is never going to be found by “David” or anyone else. The film despises the rise of the right in parts of Spain, but makes no effort to address why it was succeeding - beyond unsubstantiated rhetoric that somehow makes their own cause every bit as militaristic and oppressive as the one it was fighting so valiantly to resist. It presupposes a worthiness amongst these socialists to be judge and jury and depicts the contrary institutions, especially the church, as limbs of a extremist government - but it relies on the viewer’s own convictions about that to make it’s point rather then use these characters to prove they are better, or fairer or more honest and decent. The behaviour of Tom Gilroy’s “Lawrence” epitomises some of those attitudes effectively. Many of the local population viscerally affected by these years of relentless bullets and bombs were desperate for it all to end but that is the last thing these freedom fighters want and by the conclusion, well I felt that they came across more as war tourists who would fight where there was a fight to fight rather than people who actually cared about the fabric of the nation they were in. It is a provocative subject that had huge opportunities to shine a light on the unstoppable rise of nationalism from the Apennines to the Pyrenees in this turbulent decade, but instead it uses a really quite mediocre cast to score some lacklustre points and then just fizzle out. Pity.
