Belfast (2021) represents a significant milestone in British writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s career, being the first time he has mined his own personal history, namely his upbringing in working class Belfast in the late 1960s. Belfast is clearly a passion project for Branagh in a way that can scarcely be said of his previous directorial forays, which include a number of Shakespearean adaptations and the recent workmanlike Agatha Christie updates Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. The semi-autobiographical Belfast appears to engage Branagh’s emotional IQ as well as his technical proficiency as a director. Some critics have derided the film for its overt sentimentality and its undeniably rose-tinted view of the origins of the sectarian conflict known to history as the Troubles.
But I would defend the film’s standpoint on the grounds that it deliberately views the world with the eyes of a nine-year-old; specifically those of the film’s main protagonist, ”Buddy” (impressive newcomer Jude Hill, whose nuanced, un-self-conscious performance is by far the best thing in the film), who is essentially a lightly fictionalised younger version of Branagh himself. Seen through Buddy’s eyes, his parents (played in laconic style by Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe) and even his grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and regular Branagh alumnus Judi Dench) are heroic figures. The incipient sectarian conflict, while obviously distressing, is really just background noise to Buddy, whose immediate concerns are gaining academic promotion at his school (as measured by the proximity of his desk to the front of the classroom) and winning the romantic favour of his fair Catholic classmate Catherine (Olivia Tennant). The Troubles may have been a source of great angst and no small amount of terror for Buddy’s family and a primary factor in their eventual wrenching decision to emigrate, but for Buddy they were just another baffling aspect of the mystifying adult world just beyond his horizon.
The critics who have given voice to disapproval of the film’s sentimentality are given some ammunition by the stark black-and-white cinematography by Haris Zambarioukos. The scene is set in the film’s opening minutes, when a commanding full-colour aerial shot pans over contemporary Belfast before dissolving into a monochrome portrayal of the ‘mean streets’ of Buddy’s youth. Might we be going back in time? The omnipresence of Belfast native son Van Morrison on the soundtrack borders on cliché, as does the showing of an episode of “Star Trek” on the living room television. (Branagh does have the confidence to include an in-joke; at one point Buddy is shown reading the Marvel comic-book “Thor”, and the like-named cinematic version was Branagh’s own directorial contribution to the Marvel comic universe.)
But these criticisms might be said to fall under the category of quibbles. Branagh’s intent is clearly not to portray his personal origin story with Ken Loach style slice-of-life realism. Instead, the film is really a love-letter by Branagh to his extended family and the community that nurtured him. His portrayal of the Troubles really serves as a way for Branagh to contrast the more humane, liberal attitude of Buddy’s father, played with stoic understatement by Dornan, with the snarling, malignant intolerance of the Protestant stand-over man Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan). The father has a defining moment late in the film where he tells Buddy that the object of his awakening desire, Catherine, would be welcome in their house because the content of her character was far more important than any sectarian difference. The mother is more than a match for him, as witnessed in a semi-comic scene when she forces Buddy to return the ii-gotten box of detergent that he had purloined from a looted Catholic-owned grocery store. The family’s parlous economic circumstances, which compel Buddy’s father to leave and seek work in Britain, combine with the impact of the Troubles to force the family to resolve to emigrate in search of a better life.
And at the film’s conclusion Branagh includes a tribute which gives an eloquent testimony to the oft-neglected, lasting effects of migration: grief and guilt.