Kenneth Branagh’s Airbrushed “Belfast”

The greatest threat to this film comes not from the stink of sectarian conflict but from the aroma of sweetness.
Black and white image of Jamie Dornan Jude Hill walking in a field.
Set during the Troubles, the film stars Jamie Dornan as Pa and Jude Hill as Buddy, the young hero.Photograph by Rob Youngson / Courtesy Focus Features

The title of Kenneth Branagh’s new movie, “Belfast,” is something of a giveaway. That is the city where he was born, toward the end of 1960; where the whole of the film unfolds, beginning in the summer of 1969; and where the youthful hero, a kid named Buddy (Jude Hill), feels completely at home. Indeed, he knows nowhere else. As a bright lad, he can imagine other places, and we hear the opening strains of “Star Trek” on his TV. For the most part, though, the end of the street, the church, and the school mark Buddy’s final frontier.

That street is presented, in an early sequence, as a paradise—almost a parody—of civic togetherness. Children lark about, adults chatter like crows, and the cry of “Buddy, your ma’s calling you home to tea” is passed along, from one merry citizen to the next, until it reaches the boy’s ears. I half expected the entire neighborhood to explode into song, in a rerun of “Consider Yourself” from “Oliver!” (1968). Instead, we get a different kind of outburst: a sudden volley of violence, boosted by furious chants and the hurling of stones. (The chaos is frantically filmed from multiple angles—more, perhaps, than you would believe possible, or wise.) Everyone ducks for cover, lids of trash cans are deployed as shields, and Buddy’s mother (Caitríona Balfe) has to rush through the hullabaloo to rescue her son. If paradise can be so rudely interrupted, how long till it’s lost?

Anybody who turns to “Belfast” for a deep delve into the roots of the Troubles, in Northern Ireland, will be frustrated. Only the barest of contexts is supplied—deliberately so, for this is, above all, a Buddy’s-eye view of events. He is aware that he lives on a mixed street, where Protestants (like him and his relatives) have traditionally rubbed along with Catholics. Now, for reasons that he doesn’t fully understand, some people don’t care for the rub. Buddy also sees the barricades that are quickly built to keep communities apart, and the British soldiers who are brought in to keep the peace. But what matters equally, in his mind, is the clever girl in his class, at school, with her long fair hair. She happens to be a Catholic, but so what? The two of them get to collaborate on a project about the moon landings, and, at the conclusion of the story, she solemnly gives him a copy of “Maths Made Easy.” Such is love.

The greatest threat to this film comes not from the stink of sectarian conflict but from the aroma of sweetness. The camera clings to Buddy as it did to the grinning kid in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988). Both of them are made to go to church, both worship at the altar of the movies, and both draw perilously near to the cute. Buddy is no less adorable in his moments of mischief—stealing a candy bar, at the urging of his cousin Frances (Freya Yates), only to find that his haul is Turkish delight, which nobody likes. A later and graver transgression occurs in the middle of a riot. A local Catholic-owned store is being looted, and Buddy, dragged along by Frances, grabs a packet of soap powder, just for the hell of it. What makes the scene is its immediate consequence: the righteous wrath of his mother, who collars her son, leads him back into the melee, and forces him to replace the stolen goods. Her word is law.

Despite this flurry of panic, what Balfe lends to the maternal role is a kind of unrushed grace; she seems by turns luminous, vigilant, and stern. Fans of “Ford v Ferrari” (2019) will recall her as a woman among brawling boys, and in “Belfast” her character is once again tasked with holding a family together. The end credits refer to the members of the household as Buddy would: his father, often absent and financially feckless, is Pa (Jamie Dornan), and his grandparents are Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench). Branagh, as befits someone who has overseen a Shakespearean troupe, is a skillful caster, and his particular coup, in this case, is to furnish Hinds, one of the most gently formidable of actors, with a part that Hinds can inhabit and enrich at his leisure. Those of us who relished him in “Munich” (2005) and “There Will Be Blood” (2007) were left wanting more. Here is plenty more, including the sight of Pops dispensing wisdom to Buddy while perched on an outside toilet—Hinds’s grandest enthronement, I would say, since he played Julius Caesar in “Rome,” on HBO.

The new film is shot largely, though not wholly, in black-and-white. At the start, we are given a tour of modern Belfast, to the sound of Van Morrison—who, like Hinds, was born there—and in lustrous color. It is as if Branagh, ever the optimist, wants to reassure the audience that his home town did, for all its tribulations, pull through and prosper. (Of the recent political protests that have unsettled the place afresh—some of them involving a generation born since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998—we hear no mention. So dread an echo would not chime well with this tale.) Color returns during family trips to the cinema, when we see garishly splendid clips of “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968) and glimpse their radiant reflection in Granny’s spectacles. What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.


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