Review: BELFAST

After an slideshow to a Van Morrison tune that sjhows how lovely Belfast has become we go over a garden wall to join neighbourhood kids at the end of the black and white 1960s at noisy play. Soon one of them notices a pack of men gathering at the end of the street. They are wielding blunt intstruments and yelling. Someone makes a car into a massive Molotov cocktail with a rag and the petrol tank. When it ignites it bucks like an injured horse before exploding into a mass of fire. Local lads, just come to see to that Catholic neighbour infestation. These are not the troubles you pack up in an ol' kit bag, they are the bloody, blazing, bastard troubles in Norn Irn, fought in the streets and lanes and hearts and minds and eyes and limbs and spines.

And then it kind of calms down as we meet the family. No names but they do feel like a family with Da who comes home every other weekend from his tradie job in England, Ma who has to manage everything and the two boys who find that childhood is no barrier to the attentions of the local gangsters who think they are freedom fighters. The family forms the arc of this quite gentle recollection of writer/director Kenneth Branagh and the point of contention needed for any story to progress is, in this case, whether to stay home or flee this violence they don't buy into.

That seems a slight precis of a full length feature but Belfast is not about plot but character and episode. A very fine cast take us through the question of uprooting from tradition and history while the old council estate streets tighten with hatred. Branagh, like many actors turned director, like to dazzle and demonstrate just how cinematic he can be but here this is almost entirely kept to the device of black and white that can admit glorious colour when it needs to.

The result is that this film never drags once, doesn't outstay its welcome, and offers a continuous stream of charm broken now and then by some grim reality. The sense of the impossibility of normality continuing through such determined hostility is clear and will make you wonder about your own street broken by conflict. We live in times when restraint at seeing parallels between such conflict and that being so cacophanous in our own homes. Think fighting over which version of an imaginary friend is crazy? Talk to an anti-vaxxer.

I recently rewatched Fellini's Roma for a project of this blog. It's stretch and depth and whimsy are peerless as it wards off nostalgia in preference for recalling how it really felt. It's a marvel but I can't help feeling that I'll always prefer to see its far more sentimental follow up Amarcord. That's close to where Belfast lives. Branagh keeps a heartrending and family-severing issue at the centre but insists on the perspective of a child growing a little more wise than he should be. If that's the worst I can say about this its work is done.