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Kenneth Branagh's Belfast
Jude Hill stars as "Buddy" in director Kenneth Branagh's Belfast
When he was nine years old, Kenneth Branagh witnessed a Protestant mob tearing through his Belfast neighborhood, marking the homes of Roman Catholics. It was at the start of “The Troubles,” those violent years when Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority fought to maintain their grip on the province’s Catholic minority as the British army failed to keep the peace. Branagh’s childhood memory is the grain of sand around which formed a pearl of a film, Branagh’s latest as a director, Belfast.
Belfast begins and ends in full color, showing the city today, at peace with cruise ships docked in the harbor and colorful murals covering old walls. However, the film’s story, set in 1969, is rendered in lustrous black and white. Color occurs only at the picture show and the playhouse. There, the nine-year old protagonist, Buddy (Jude Hill, disarmingly brilliant), watches Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and A Christmas Carol with his family, drinking up inspiration for the media, screen and stage, where the grown-up Branagh would excel. Belfast is the director’s imaginative autobiography. In one black and white scene, Buddy sits on the curb reading a Thor comic book, a sly allusion to Branagh’s 2011 superhero movie.
On sunny Saturdays everyone is on the street in Buddy’s mixed Protestant-Catholic neighborhood, greeting each other with a fond good day. The neighbor ladies remind the children to behave and the kids kick balls across the dirty pavement or play with sticks for swords and ashcan covers for shields. The idyll shatters with the arrival of that angry, club and chain-wielding Protestant mob. In the pandemonium of destruction, the ringleaders light a rag, stuff it up the gas tank of someone’s parked car and send the vehicle down the street. Buddy takes shelter under the kitchen table with his mum (Caitrona Balfe).
Keen with its memories of childhood, Belfast show Buddy, ears at the stairwell rail, listening as his parents argue and trying to decipher the secrets of grown-ups. Many scenes are shot looking up, a child’s perspective of the big adult world, or with cameras looking down, the watchful POV of an adult—or God. With Belfast, Branagh proves capable of stylized cinema. A few moments are almost film noir, especially one nighttime scene, search lights bounding across the inky darkness as vigilantes patrol with torches raised.
Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) is often away across the Irish Sea in England, working in the building trade. When home, he’s a pillar of resolve, refusing to budge when threatened by Protestant ringleaders who demand that he join their side. One of the movies Buddy watches on TV, High Noon, provides the model—at least in the boy’s imagination—for his father’s final showdown and the family’s ultimate decision.
The overall mood is one of hazy nostalgia leavened with humor, especially from the kindly grandparents (Judi Dench, Ciarán Hinds), and stiffened by the tragedy of religious hatred. Belfast has a lot to say about the human condition and says it movingly and entertainingly.
