2021
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Written by Kenneth Branagh
Music by Van Morrison
BH2 Odeon
Monday 7th January 2022
CAST:
Jude Hill – Buddy
Catriona Balfe- Ma
Jamie Dornan – Pa
Ciaran Hinds- Pop
Judi Dench- Granny
with
Colin Morgan – Billy
Lewis McAskie- Will
Josie Walker – Auntie Violet
Freya Yates – Cousin Frances
Nessa Eriksson – Auntie Violet
Our first visit to a cinema in nearly two years, and we chose the 12.30 lunchtime performance to get a quiet cinema for social distancing. It’s Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical film.
It had to be a special film, and for us this is. Karen moved to Belfast at a few weeks old, and lived there till she was eight or nine. As friends know, she pronounces her name the Irish way, like ‘Care-en’, not ‘Ka-ren’. When she came to England, she had a strong Belfast accent because all the kids spent their time playing in the street. It was so strong that first in Cheltenham, then in Bournemouth she was made to stand out the front and read aloud while the class roared with laughter. That led to a teacher suggesting elocution lessons, which then led to speech and drama exams, and drama. (This is the same way that Kenneth Branagh lost his Belfast accent, of course).
We’ve been back to Belfast twice. Once was shortly after Good Friday, the last a few years ago in 2015. Shops still had metal ‘bombproof’ shutters. The first time we went back, the armoured cars and barbed wire were still evident everywhere. Last time it was much more relaxed, though the Peace Wall still divides communities, and a Catholic area had metal gates to close at night to protect against drive by bombings.
We took the “political taxi tour” (highly recommended)of the murals and memorials. Our driver was great, and we couldn’t work out which side he was on until he showed us his uncle’s name on a memorial. His uncle had spent ten years in the Maze. We cautiously asked what for, and he said, ‘Just the usual. The bombing.’ Then he had tears in his eyes at the Bobby Sands memorial mural. That’s by the Sinn Fein offices. Because I’ve been working on British and American regionalisms, I asked our driver if I could take a photo of the offices … I know when to ask before taking a photo. Two burly guys in large overcoats were standing outside the entrance watching the road carefully. He went and spoke to them. Then he beckoned me over. They both shook hands, welcomed me to Belfast, moved out of camera range and waved me on to take the photo. No problem, all friendly, but you sense that underlying tensions have not dissipated.
Anyway, Karen said she’d grown up in Belfast, but had her accent virtually beaten out of her by the kids in England. Our driver was appalled and immediately said, ‘Did you start a fight?’ Karen was there pre-Troubles, and her street was Protestant one side, Catholic the other. The kids all played together all the time, but if ever there was a fight, they immediately lined up on pre-set sides. Karen has often said that if she’d stayed in Belfast she’d probably have been dead years ago. You get pulled into it, you take sides because of what happens to you or your family, just as Buddy, the central young boy, gets pulled into shoplifting and looting by an older girl cousin. Then it all becomes a ‘revengers tragedy.’ Karen left well before the Troubles. Branagh’s film is when he left, a decade later, right at the start of the Troubles.
Is this the time or place to go into the Troubles? I used to say it was like Celtic v Rangers in Glasgow. You grew up with green and white scarves or blue and white scarves, to which were attached religious labels … Catholic for Celtic, Protestant for Rangers. It’s tribal tradition rather than theology. No one is discussing the doctrines of Transubstantiation or Papal infallibility. Look at the murals of King William III and the Battle of The Boyne. The English deliberately encouraged Scots Protestants to settle in the North of Ireland in the 17th century … sorry, it’s all about the 17th century.
When the British army moved in, in 1969, they were initially welcomed as protecting the Catholics from Protestant paramilitaries (as in this film, though they were brutal to both). Trouble was that the Protestants were flying Union flags and the Republicans were flying Irish flags and throwing bricks at the Union flags. Then nobody had thought that many of the British troops were from Scottish Protestant areas. They were soon felt to be on the Unionist side.
The hellfire Protestant minister is terrifying for young Buddy in the film (think Reverend Ian Paisley in a bad mood).
There’s an ancient joke. An Englishman went to a Celtic v Rangers match and found himself standing between a Catholic Celtic fan and a Protestant Rangers fan. Celtic scored first. The Englishman clapped, ‘Good goal.’ The Rangers fan glared at him. Then Rangers scored. The Englishman clapped again, ‘Excellent goal.’ The Celtic fan looked at the Rangers fan and said, ‘He must be a fucking atheist! Let’s beat the shit out of him!’
Incidentally, Catholic areas of Belfast are marked by Celtic football signs and crests.
Branagh places his story in a largely Protestant street, with a few Catholic families. Our central family is Protestant. The neighbours from both communities get along together. The kids play together. Karen found the way the kids in the film are allowed to run into anyone’s house in the street during childhood games most poignant. She’s always described that ; all the doors were open. You could run into anyone’s house.
Buddy has a crush on a Catholic school mate (actually, it’s unlikely the school was ‘integrated’ … the Protestants went to allegedly integrated schools. The Catholics went to church schools). Then the Protestant paramilitaries move in, riot and order the Catholics out. As we saw on our taxi political tour, there are streets of new terraced houses on both sides replacing those which were burned out and bombed by the “other” side.
It’s all from Buddy’s angle (Jude Hill). His parents are just called Pa (Jamie Dornan) and Ma.(Catriona Balfe). The grandparents are Pop (Ciaron Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench). Pa is away working in England, coming home every second weekend. Granny points out that if the Irish had never gone abroad, there’d be no pubs in the world (one of many, many great lines). Ma has to bring up Buddie and his older brother, Will. As the Troubles expand, then the British army arrives, the violence escalates.
Pa wants the family to move to England, leaving behind all their family and close friends. This is what happened to Branagh.
The Men of Violence appear and threaten, led by Billy (Colin Morgan). At one point he threatens Pa (Jamie) and asks if he’s a real Protestant. Jamie’s reply sums up the men of violence on both sides:
Pa: You’re not a “Protestant”. You’re just a jumped up gangster.
Notably after the big confrontation (no plot spoiler), Pa is advised to go away … the next visitors will not be the jumped up gangsters, but ‘the serious ones.’ The black leather jacket seems a known badge. Both Martin McDonagh (Lieutenant of Inishmore) and Jez Butterworth (The Ferryman) use the black leather jacket for the men of violence in stage plays, in both those cases Republican ones, so it was a shared affectation.
The cast is a major draw. Ciaran Hinds (Pop = granddad) in the Man In The Hat was the lead in our favourite film of 2021. We watched Catriona Balfe (Ma) in all five series of Outlander. We really enjoyed Wild Mountain Thyme with Jamie Dornan (Pa).We’ve seen Branagh on stage. We are great fans of him both as an actor and as a director. Note that Jamie Dornan is Northern Irish. Ciaron Hinds is from Belfast (but Catholic). Catriona Balfe was born in the Republic of Ireland, but close to the Northern Irish border, which she says she crossed regularly. Judi Dench had a Dublin mother. They’re all perfect on accent. Jude Hill is a phenomenally good child actor.
The screenplay moves from euphoric nostalgia to sudden urgent and literally explosive drama, to incipient threat, then all interspersed with flashes of humour and then tenderness. It’s laden with memorable lines too.
It’s technically brilliant. It’s black and white, but starts and ends with shots of Belfast today in colour. Old movies the kids watch on TV are black and white but when they go to the cinema to watch One Million Years BC and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, extracts are seen as colour, as is the Christmas pantomime of A Christmas Carol. The movies references, especially The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon are important.
You can tell that Branagh is an actor and an actor’s director: each of the four principals gets a long, moving speech in tight close up. Each of them is an ‘Academy Award example’ speech too.
SOUNDTRACK
The effects make you sit up … suddenly a military helicopter will appear in sound above you and move across the cinema. That’s what it was like in this semi-war zone.
The Van Morrison soundtrack is ‘found’ songs but every one placed with precision. So when Pa is about to leave for England, it’s Carrickfergus (The sea is wide … and I can’t cross over … One Irish Rover …) The end credits put the song so much in the right place that the tears which had welled up on Judi Dench’s final speech, ‘Go now …’ welled up again. The end credits say ‘For all those who left … For all those who stayed … For all those who lost their lives …’ whereupon Van Morrison’s And The Healing Has Begun … fills the cinema. I will say that Branagh knows Van’s catalogue.
I noted that at the wake, Pa (Jamie Dornan) sings Everlasting Love in a church hall with a band, and the sound is church hall, echoey, boomy in contrast to the perfection of the Van songs. It feels like someone singing live in a church hall, and it had to be a 1969 pure pop hit too.
But how ever did they miss out Van Morrison and The Chieftains singing the traditional children’s street song, I’ll Tell Me Ma, a song that always reminds Karen of playing in the street.
She is handsome. She is pretty.
She is the belle of Belfast City.
She is courtin’ one, two, three.
Please won’t you tell me, who is she?
Belle, not as online “bell.” Belfast has equal stress in Northern Ireland, Belle Fast, as if two words. i.e. Beautiful Harbour.
I’m surprised that it only got Best Screenplay at The Golden Globes … losing out to The Power of The Dog. Unequivocally, much as I loved Power of The Dog, Belfast is the better film, better screenplay and better direction. I fear, that as with Kenneth Branagh himself as a child (and Karen) the Belfast accents may be too strong for the USA critics.
It had some contrasting reaction. Check out the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw (link to review) rightly gave it 5 stars, noting that his dad moved from Belfast too. So he knows. A snotty review by Simran Hands in the companion The Observer gave it two stars, saying “offers nostalgia but avoids getting to grips with the Troubles … a 30-year conflict that started with civil rights protests is boiled down to a vague problem of “bloody religion” “. What does she know about it? That’s how it was. Divided streets. Both sides dominated by the Men of Violence. The rioters’ attack at the beginning is magnificent filming, it makes it so real.
It’s 1969. It’s real. Perhaps not quite real in having an Asian shopkeeper and an Afro-Caribbean schoolteacher. Belfast in that era did not appeal to ethnic minorities (they would have been in the position of the Englishman at the Celtic v Rangers match) and Karen remembers none at all then … it’s different now.
We only noted two minor negatives. First, both Catriona Balfe and Jamie Dorman are film star good looking. Nothing they can do about that. The other was Catriona Balfe having bare arms on Christmas Day. These would not have been centrally-heated houses.
Our review was above a possible five stars. We both agreed that we are talking about one of the very best films of the last decade. This may sound like hyperbole, but in direction, screenplay, cinematography, soundtrack and acting we are in Citizen Kane, Cinema Paradiso, Casablanca, North by Northwest territory. Yes, really. That good.
*****
Anyway, we both love Northern Ireland. The first time we went back, she saw the neighbours from the 1950s, and within five minutes we were indoors having tea and cake. It’s a really good place to visit, a beautiful coastline, friendly, excellent restaurants in the Belfast Cathedral Quarter. Plus I can’t drink beer. I must have an allergy but I can drink Belfast Black stout. We order it online by the case and it’s way better than Guinness..
REVIEWS ON THIS SITE:
KENNETH BRANAGH (STAGE)
Romeo & Juliet (director)
The Winter’s Tale
All On Her Own & Harlequinade by Terence Rattigan
The Painkiller, by Francis Veber
CATRIONA BALFE
Outlander Series 1-5
JAMIE DORNAN
Wild Mountain Thyme
CIARAN HINDS
The Man In The Hat
JUDI DENCH
Peter and Alice (Grandage Company)
The Winter’s Tale (Branagh company)
Philomena (film)
The Joy of Six (film short)
Jane Eyre (film)
COLIN MORGAN
A Number by Caryl Churchill (stage)
Testament of Youth (film)
Mojo by Jez Butterworth (stage)
Peter Viney's Blog 
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