Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is a coming-of-age tale where the reverie of youth is intermittently pierced by the unpleasantness of political conflict. After a full-color opening montage of the environs of present-day Belfast, the film plunges into monochrome and to the past, the camera wildly circling around young Buddy (Jude Hill) as he skips down the street outside of his home. That swirl of the camera works to immerse us into the hubbub of a lively residential community in late-’60s Belfast. But the jubilance quickly dissipates, along with the upbeat music on the soundtrack, as a melee breaks out, a result of the escalating tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the early days of the Troubles.
Drawing from his formative years growing up in North Ireland’s capital before his family moved to England, Branagh regards his young stand-in’s coming of age with a dewy-eyed zeal. Hailing from a Protestant family, Buddy is a naïve witness to his country’s growing religious divide, as well as the mounting pressure put on his Pa (Jamie Dornan) by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) to join the local uprising to oust Catholics from the neighborhood. Pa tries his best to prevent Buddy and his older brother, Will (Lewis McAskie), from getting pulled into this nebulous cause, but as he’s constantly working over in England, it’s Ma (Caitríona Balfe) who’s chiefly responsible for making sure that their boys aren’t exposed to violence.
Belfast is a sentimental act of remembrance, a seeming attempt on Branagh’s part to link his memories of childhood—all the incidents, big and small, of a specific time and place from the past—to his journey as an artist. But the guiding principle of the film would appear to be sentiment above all else, as in Buddy’s charming interactions with his sprightly grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds) and flirtations with a school crush, Catherine (Olive Tennant), which exude the sense of memory being tempered through a pall of nostalgia.
A line can still be traced from the filmmaker that Branagh would become to the little boy in Belfast whose head is filled with all manner of extraordinary possibilities every time he goes to a picture house. As Buddy and his family watch such classics as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Belfast momentarily becomes a color film, attesting to cinema’s transportive and inspiring nature. Branagh also shrewdly conveys how movies are intimately enmeshed with our memories of the past. Even though Granny regards Buddy’s love of movies with bemused puzzlement, it’s infectious enough that it gets her to reminisce about her youthful desire to “crawl right inside the screen and explore the places you saw.”
The film’s aesthetic is, then, aptly inviting, melding a stark naturalism with flashes of dreamlike meditation. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos’s vivid monochrome images have an impressionistic quality, allowing the scenes to converge like tributaries to a river. At times, this can result in a certain level of narrative murkiness, particularly in the sketching of Pa’s apparently demanding career; much is made of his long absences, yet he’s always conveniently present during the most emotionally fraught moments in his family’s life. But, then, Belfast’s images also suggest nothing less than the malleability and uncertainty of memory.
Up until its last act, the film largely avoids even so much as acknowledging the existence of the IRA struggle, only hinting at it during a few trite verbal confrontations between Pa and Billy. (“The problem with men like you is you think you’re better than us,” Billy haughtily declares during one such scene, to which Pa responds, without missing a beat, “The problem with men like you is you know you’re not.”) So when Branagh eventually brings politics to the foreground, beginning with Pa’s urgent suggestion that the family move to England to escape the encroaching violence, it results in a certain dissonance that’s harder to reconcile. Because the film underplays the tensions and grievances of the Troubles for such a long stretch of its running time, this moment is less an acknowledgement of truths that can no longer be shielded from a child than it is a conspicuous show of dramatic effect.
No less incongruous is the climactic sequence in which another riot breaks out on Buddy’s street, devolving into a hostage standoff between Pa and Billy as they’re flanked by military personnel. It’s fair to say that this denouement is intended to channel the energy of those larger-than-life big-screen moments that light up Buddy’s face when he goes to a picture show. But in being intrinsically tied to the thorniness of an urgent real-life conflict, this dramatic incident only makes you long for a more extensive inquiry, a la Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, into a world whose fury isn’t so concealed beneath a meticulously controlled surface. Which is to say that while Belfast both understands and embodies cinema’s ability to offer a kind of escapism, up until its climax it plays like a retreat from reality.
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