Kenneth Branagh has ventured bravely into contested territory with this deeply personal film, set at the outbreak of the Troubles in the city of his birth. So divisions are inevitable, with those who deplore it as a travesty of political reality ranged against others who recognise their own stories in it, or simply like it for what it is: a portrait of an ordinary childhood upended by extraordinary communal violence.
There’s no pretence here to offer a political overview. Part of the film’s strength is the way it holds the focus at the level of a small boy’s understanding, so the betrayals seem inexplicable, the threat only ever half seen. As long as nine-year-old Buddy (played by Jude Hill) can go to the cinema with his granny to see thrilling new technicolour releases – which cast a romantic glow over his imagination that resists the sombre palette of the film itself – everything is more or less right in his world.
This is how childhood is; it’s how children have always been able to survive the most terrible circumstances. If Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe seem implausibly glamorous, it’s because that’s how Buddy sees them; if Ciarán Hinds’s roguish Pop seems impossibly erudite, it’s because anyone who can do maths homework seems like a genius to a small child who can’t.
Branagh knew he was opening himself up to charges of sentimentality, and reviewers have duly obliged, but it’s a lazy position. The film is not about blue remembered hills but grey remembered streets: in its palette, its pacing and the rigour of its perspective, it earns the emotion it calls from us. It might big up the quaint values of working-class family and community, unfashionably pitting old-fashioned neighbourhood policing against the growing lawlessness of the street in one comic scene of Buddy getting his comeuppance. But there’s a bigger reality, written across the clenched, scored face of Judi Dench’s Granny, or overheard through the parentheses of doors and windows in snippets of adult conversation (“The police won’t protect us. We have to do it ourselves”).
In 98 tightly edited minutes (beautifully shot by Haris Zambarloukos) it reveals a depressed, monochrome city, where the women struggle to put chips on the table, and the men are forced overseas to find work; where a spittle-flecked preacher showers vitriol on the heads of his congregation; where neighbours who look out for a small boy are quick to crab about his mother, and there’s no future for friendship between children from different faiths.
Above all it’s a film about migration: about all that is lost when political circumstances make home impossible. “When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind,” wrote the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, of another continent in another era. Buddy and his parents leave Pop in the cemetery and Granny standing alone in the street muttering, “Go, and don’t look back.”
It’s sad, for sure, but through the strength of its performances, its eye for the pratfalls of childhood, its grasp of the tragic absurdity of communal strife, it avoids being simply sentimental. At this new moment of loss and mass displacement, Belfast deserves to be taken very seriously indeed.
