Belfast. Review by Bill Doherty of Kenneth Branagh's film

 

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!”.