I had always enjoyed
seeing Kenneth Branagh in films and TV serialisations - Henry V, Peter’s
Friends and Fortunes of War - and knowing he came from a Northern
Ireland Protestant background, was interested in finding out what insights his
new film Belfast would offer on the city’s recent violent past. In
this instance, Branagh had written the screenplay and directed the film but was
not featuring in a cast given the ballast of authenticity by the
Irish backgrounds of the principal actors (Judi Dench squeezes in courtesy of an
Irish mother). The sense of place was endorsed in glowing
reviews from Belfast-born critics who generally gushed over the film as a walk
down memory lane. The autobiographical
load is carried by the eleven-year- old Jude Hill who portrays the young
Branagh.
The film opens with
Buddy, the young Kenneth, being called into his terrace house by Ma as he plays
in his working-class street and turns to face the camera waving a wooden sword
in one hand and a metal dustbin lid, doubling as a shield, in the other. The dustbin lid was destined to become emblematic
of the Troubles as the female occupants of whole streets banged them to warn of
incursions by the Army or the police. An
unheralded incursion by a violent mob shatters this idyll of childhood
innocence and Ma sallies forth to pull Buddy into the safety of the house. Visibly terrified, Buddy and Ma, crouching
down, look out as the mob violently expels the few Catholic residents from this
Protestant street. Having set the
contextual background which was to mark the next three decades of life in
Belfast, the director focuses on Buddy’s family. Pa (Jamie Dornan) is a contract worker who
spends weeks at a time working in the south of England while Ma (Catriona
Balfe) looks after the house and family. Since both came to acting after
careers as prominent models and Dornan is best known as Christian in the 50 Shades
film trilogy, questions have been posed about inappropriate glamourisation of
proletarian Belfast. Pa’s parents, Pop
and Granny, are played by the fine character actors Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench,
neither of whom need to move up from second gear for their undemanding roles. Buddy has a teenage older brother, Will.
Three male-female
relationships provide the framework for the film. Pop’s persistent cough, references to past
employment in heavy industry in England and recurring mentions of hospital
appointments mark him as a participant in a parallel drama - Chronicle of a
Death Foretold. Enthroned in
regal splendour on the outside WC, he dispenses folksy aphorisms to Buddy while
Granny listens from the backroom, interjecting corrections to Pop’s narrative. Things
are rather more strained between Ma and Pa, with his absences in England and
his debts which she is laboriously paying off. Pa is keen to emigrate – Australia,
Canada, England? – while Ma is rooted in the Belfast of her childhood. Buddy’s eye is fixed on the clever, blonde
girl who is top of his class and is inspired to greater academic efforts by the
prospect of sharing a desk with her. They
bond as Maths adepts.
The dramatic tension over
whether the family goes or stays tilts towards the exit with the advent of
sinister Loyalist paramilitaries who give Pa the choice of joining or making
regular financial contributions to the cause.
Buddy is coaxed into joining a mass break in and looting of a local
supermarket by a mischievous cousin and Pa realises that his elder son is also
in the paramilitaries’ net as an errand boy.
Buddy is rescued from an ugly hostage situation with armed Loyalists by
the Army. The family dilemma is amplified as we see Will and Buddy at Sunday
School where a mandible-chomping, Paisleyesque hellfire cleric belabours the
metaphor of the fork in the road. The Leave metaphor persists in lighter
moments in full colour where the family see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the
local cinema and watch the scene where the eponymous all-purpose car is used to
effect an escape from the white cliffs. Pop dies, as earlier signposted, and is
remembered at an exceptionally lively wake. The film closes with the family boarding
the airport bus and waving farewell to Granny as she stands outside her
terraced house, having instructed them never to look back. The final shot in colour shows the giant
cranes of the Harland and Wolff yard illuminated against the night sky and features
a dedication with a cosmopolitan touch, an echo of the title of the third
volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet; Storia di chi fugge e di chi
resta. For those who left and those
who stayed.
The screenplay was
written by Branagh who also directed the work.
Haris Zambarloukos provides wonderful cinematography rendering almost
all the film in flat, clean black and white with vivid close ups of strained
and emotionally taut faces. The musical soundtrack
is dominated by another Belfast voice, Van Morrison, and the acting is uniformly
excellent. Criticism of the sanitised, superficial
and sentimental portrayal of Belfast is deflected by the director’s contention
that it is seen through the eyes of a young boy, but it fails to generate
dramatic tension and the family’s debate on moving to the south of England for
employment could just as easily have been set in Ancoats, Toxteth, Byker or
Govan. Set in a Protestant working class
community like Branagh’s own Mountcollyer St. in the Tiger’s Bay district, it
is a paean of praise to a pre-Troubles Protestant Belfast. We watch Ma explain to Buddy that Catholics
believe Confession wipes the slate of iniquity clean and that they souse
themselves in Holy Water. Whether this
justifies burning them out their houses remains an unasked question as does
which locals directed the invading mob to the Catholic houses. The whole community seems to fall in quietly
with the new dispensation of paramilitaries and barricades.
This hollowed out
Belfast, sprinkled with stardust and avoiding the issues that make it a unique
British city may not only reflect the director’s addiction to saccharin and a
shrewd eye for box office success but possibly a conscious decision to avoid
meatier material. There was an almost
tangential indication that Pa was fearful his sons were being caught up in the
paramilitaries’ net. On Remembrance
Sunday 2001, the 18-year-old Glen Branagh of Mountcollyer St., Tiger’s Bay,
described as “a distant relative” of Kenneth, died when, according to a police
witness, a home-made pipe bomb he was throwing into a crowd of Catholics
exploded prematurely. As late as 2018
young Glen, a member of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association’s youth
wing, was still being memorialised on a banner directed at the adjacent
Nationalist New Lodge Estate. A Glen
rather than a Buddy as the central protagonist might have produced a more
dramatic and revelatory film.
In conclusion, Branagh’s
film is a success in terms of cinematic virtuosity, strong acting and comforting
sentimentality but in its exploration of the clamant social issues of the day
is more Gone with the Wind than In the Heat of the Night. A suggestion to which Branagh would probably
assert “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”.
