Belfast (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2021) — Review

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Belfast’s opening moments carry the audience from a vibrant, tourist-reel montage of the city today into a black-and-white memory of 1969 on a dreamy sonic wave of Van Morrison, “beautiful Belfast accents”, and something distant yet unmistakeable: the hum of an active, tight-knit community. Even without the visual cues — the shift in colour, the herd of knee-socked children tumbling over each other at hopscotch or football — we instantly hear that we are entering a memorial of sorts, a relic of the ‘good old days’ of unlocked doors and drinking from hosepipes, a period idolised by Facebook boomers and the alt-right alike.

Belfast succeeds in capturing the simplicity and joy of that bygone time; yet unlike some other mid-century period pieces, it succeeds just as much in capturing the transient, illusory nature of that simplicity. This, of course, is because as well as eulogising a blissful childhood, it depicts Belfast’s descent into the bloodshed of the Troubles. The Troubles make for a difficult film narrative: to those without a personal perspective on the situation, they make little rational sense. How does one ‘make sense’ of three decades of sectarian bloodshed, marked by incomprehensible physical and psychological violence, in a tiny region bound up with one of the most powerful, modern, ‘civilized’ countries in the world? The clear points of catharsis, revelation, or closure that tentpole a typical historical drama seem woefully inadequate in the face of this very recent pathological chaos. A script that asks its audience to form judgements, make decisions, or logically comprehend the situation runs the risk of trivializing it, pushing it into the realm of melodrama or crime caper.

In his piece, Belfast native and ‘British’ dramatic heavyweight Kenneth Branagh uses the wide-eyed gaze of his fictionalised ten-year-old self, Buddy (Jude Hill) to depict his homeland not as a problem to be solved, or even understood, but in the way that he experienced it: a close community defined by depth of feeling. That depth of feeling — the passionate, transcendental kinship bonds which shape Buddy’s day-to-day life in such innocent, positive ways — is equally key to understanding the bloodshed which would come to define Belfast in subsequent years.

We first meet Buddy, the protagonist, playing happily on the street amidst the burble of neighborly greetings, domestic chatter, and the truly ubiquitous Van Morrison: “He carries a primitive home-made wooden sword held aloft in one hand, and in the other an upturned dustbin lid, that he holds before him, like a shield.” In these few opening moments, Branagh establishes his vision of his hometown on the brink of the Troubles: a story of boys playing thoughtlessly at battle, with their mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, grandmothers having to clean up after them.

Buddy’s swaggering entrance — offering to kill a dragon for his neighbor — echoes in the film’s dogged returns to storybook macho heroics: Buddy’s Pa (Jamie Dornan) with a William Tell-like ability to throw an apple off his son’s head, and a fascination with the cowboy standoffs of the Western, play important structural roles. The knowingly childish perspective effectively conveys the incomprehensible reality of the Troubles, while making sense of it in the only way that an audience today, or indeed a nine-year-old boy at the time, can do — as a cluster of intense yet transient emotions, desires, confrontations, struggles, which lose and gain meaning over time.

Writer-director Branagh’s personal experience, and that of his largely Irish- or Belfast-born cast, imbue the script with an authenticity and a sense of genuine love that give the argument meaning. Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit used a comparable gimmick — the perspective of a nine-year-old boy — to depict the last days of Nazi Germany with appallingly trite, glib results. Here, the humor doesn’t come from elaborately staged punchlines or knowingly cynical wisecracks; every joke hums with the inherited cultural humor of a highly localized, endlessly repeated story of love and loss.

In theory, the key narrative tension is a practical and grown-up one: whether Buddy’s parents should leave Belfast as the situation deteriorates. Yet this issue doesn’t weigh the film down, or even dominate the plot, not only because of the focus on Buddy, but because of its particular cultural context. “The Irish were born for leavin. Otherwise the rest o the world’d have no pubs,” observes Buddy’s Aunt Violet. “It just needs half us to stay so that the other half can get sentimental about the ones that went. All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness, and the sheet music for Danny Boy.” The jokes, the chidings, the turns of phrase — “be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful” — act as family heirlooms in themselves. Simultaneously flippant and deeply sincere, these tokens of a long history of intermingled joy and loss form a distinctive cultural heritage for Belfast; a lineage in which Branagh’s film clearly wishes to locate itself.

The film’s pervasive, ardent nostalgia — a force fundamental to identity on the island of Ireland — allows Branagh to guide his audience away from oversimplifying the issue. From a screenwriting perspective, from any rational perspective, questions seem to flood in at every angle: why didn’t they just stop fighting? Why wouldn’t the family just leave? The warmth of the emotion at the heart of Branagh’s depiction of Belfast — love — avoids offering the viewer too many of these questions, or the illusion of an easy solution. More valuably, the film focuses on conveying the way that family ties can blur the lines of ‘normality’ or reason.

Again, unlike Jojo Rabbit, Belfast authentically conveys this sense of blind, uncontrollable, irrational love because everyone involved clearly loves the city, the country, the cultural heritage, as much as the writer-director does. Lead actors Dornan and Balfe — from Belfast and from the Republic’s County Monaghan respectively — bring an intense personal understanding, and investment, in the situation’s inherent, intractable contradictions. “It wasn’t all doom and gloom,” Dornan has said of his “truly brilliant childhood” in the city; “as much as there was a civil war raging for that amount of time, there was also lots of light as well”.

The other great love affair — aside from regular romance, between Buddy and his schoolyard crush and between the parents and grandparents of his domestic sphere — is with film. The first flashes of cinema and theatre that Buddy sees are in bright, vivid contrast to the luscious, almost sculptural black and white of the rest of the movie. Stage and screen drama in the movie — as with storytelling in Ireland historically — are a gateway to the future, and a memorial to the past. Moving assertively to put his own childhood in this canon, Branagh uses his multi-hyphenate clout as a director and actor to portray the small-scale, domestic drama of his childhood with cinematic giants: most notably Granny (Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciarán Hinds), the pillars of Buddy’s sprawling network of friends, neighbours, and family. Much of the film takes place on their street, a rowdy, buzzing row of crammed terraces where children and parents spill over each other’s doors in a manner more like a beehive than private property. The limited space, and of course the color scheme, give the film an obvious, wilful distance from ‘realism’; and yet this makes it all the more real, as part of the particularly Northern Irish, and Irish, understanding of existence as synonymous with memory and storytelling; the entrenched idea of an imaginary homeland which is no less real for its lack of material presence.

The Belfast of Buddy’s childhood, in mid-August 1969, initially, is a portrait of fluid, unbridled community, with Catholics living on their mostly Protestant street. “These are the dog days of August. Sun-burnt parents chattering together on steps. Laughter, gossip, mickey-taking. Beautiful Belfast accents. Everybody knows everybody. No bother. Another day in the neighbourhood.” The mingled joy and loss, nostalgia and pain, do just as much as the dedication at the end to capture that Belfast, the misunderstood homeland of “those who left and those who stayed”.