Belfast

seen on 27 January 2022

Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this film partly based on his own childhood experiences living in the increasingly fraught atmosphere of Belfast in 1969, before his family moved to England. The film, beautifully photographed in black and white by Haris Zambarloukos, shows the poisonous tensions destroying the interconnectedness of a working class street when sectarian strife erupts, barriers are built, and the British Army begins its hapless involvement in the Troubles.

Almost everything we see is refracted through the eyes of young Buddy (a remarkable performance by newcomer Jude Hill), who lives in the street with his Ma (Caitriona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan), though the latter is often absent working in England, and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie). His attempts to understand the mysteries of Catholicism show the entirely convincing misapprehensions of a young child faced with something his Protestant parents frankly cannot explain. He is completely puzzled by the arcane circularity of an older friend's description of belonging to a gang. In the classroom his efforts to shine are mostly motivated by the desire to sit closer to a girl who smiles at him, who is always in the most favoured academic position (the teacher rearranges the class seating order every week according to the ranking of homework marks - her decision to seat the brightest closest to the front would probably not pass muster today). His beloved Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench) look after him some of the time, and all seems well.

However, sometimes he witnesses agonised phone conversations between his Ma and absent Pa, or face to face arguments when Pa is home, and he and his brother have to be instructed on how to react to demands from people his father does not trust. He knows there is talk of moving, and that his Ma is unwilling to exchange the familiar street with the unknown strangeness of England; only an external crisis resolves the issue. A way of life is disappearing around him but he cannot really know this; while we can infer the bigotry from a hellfire sermon, Buddy can only draw a road and try to remember which way he should take when it forks. Where we can cringe at the incipient thuggishness of some of the sectarians (Colin Morgan plays a superficially glamorous enforcer), Buddy just negotiates the barriers and plays with his friends. 

It's a finely judged tribute to a way of life that must have seemed entirely natural and secure, but which turned out to be fatally fragile in the face of wider events. The moody monochrome perfectly matches the nostalgic look at a vanished world; it is only broken by brilliant touches of  colour when Buddy is in the cinema (One Million Years BC and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) or attending the Christmas pantomime with his Granny, where the stage is in colour even though the audience is in black and white (except for the reflection of stage lights on Granny's glasses). It's this attention to technical details as much as the wonderfully understated performances that makes this examination of a perpetually difficult subject so compelling.