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.

MIFF Session 16: GOOD VIBRATIONS: Place of Pride

When music guru John Peel does the unprecedented and plays The Undertones' Teenage Kicks twice in a row on his canonical radio show the protagonist of this film, Terri Hooley dances ecstatically in his dowdy Belfast home with his wife. A banging at the front door reveals the band and a small crowd of people associated with his record shop. He runs out into the street as they dance to the song and in a blinding spotlight raises his arms in imitation of Christ, giving himself up to bliss. But the light is that of a British Army chopper observing the revelry in case it's more sectarian violence.

This tale of a punk scene's birth and nurture along with the starry eyed and accidental promoter Terri is a thoroughly enjoyable ride through disappointment and triumph. In this case there is a pleasingly Irish oh-so-what to a lot of it which sets it apart from a great many other fictionalised music histories.

This genre suffers from a common malady in the dramatisation of key moments or achievements by the heroes of its tales. When John Lennon says "I'm talking about a hard day's night" in a Hamburg bar years before he should it's one of the few cringes that mar the otherwise wonderful Backbeat. The scene of Ray Manzarek coming up with the hooky intro to Light My Fire in The Doors is the same kind of thing. One of the worst is from a tv movie about he Beach Boys. They're taking a break from recording and ogle as a babe in a Thunderbird drives by. "She's having fun," says one. "Yeah," says another, "until her daddy takes her t-bird away." Someone else snaps his fingers. Ladies and gentlemen we have a classic!

This doesn't really happen in Good Vibrations but the moment Terri hears the freshly recorded Teenage Kicks in the studio cans and approaches the control room glass with a beatific stare it is at least funny but it does dilute the kingmaker John Peel's famous later response for the sake of a cinematic moment. When Fergal Sharkey names himself in full it feels like it's for our benefit rather than Terri's. Surely he would have just used his first name at that point.

But these are quibbles. What I really like about this film apart from his sheer amiability is its sense of place. There are reminders of the war zone nature of Northern Island during the troubles so frequent (most of them footage from the time, often jarringly on blown-up analogue video) that they acquire a kind of rhythm. It's no spoiler to repeat Hooley's own words about punk in Belfast: "New York had the haircuts. London had the treasures. We had the reason."

That strikes home for me. When the Saints' video was partially shown on Countdown in 1976 I was caught by it. When the full clip was played on Flashez I wanted it to go on for hours and, for a few minutes, time really did seem to stop. There was no comparing it with anything I knew. No one was calling it punk. I forced it up against the Rolling Stones of Get Off Of My Cloud or Have You Seen You Mother Baby (rather than Brown Sugar). And they were from Brisbane, not the more sophisticated centres of Sydney or Melbourne but dowdy old Brisbane. When the term punk rose in the parlance and I heard The Damned, The Ramones and, most cataclysmically, The Sex Pistols towards the end of that year the game had changed and I had chosen my team. Increasingly, the sense that Brisbane's punk scene arose from a need in opposition to the repressive Bjelke Petersen regime. They had the reason there, too (of course, less dramatically, but still, that was the feeling).

If there comes a time to tell the tale of the Brisbane scene the way London's was abstractly attempted in Jubilee, Melbourne's in Dogs in Space or Belfast's in this I know it won't avoid the pitfalls of the subgenre of music related films but if it smoothed them out as effectively and enjoyably as Good Vibrations does we'll be in fine hands.