All of us, to one fundamental degree or another, have a powerful need to belong.
It is often what defines and shapes, and gives us a soul-nourishing sense of time and place, and when it is broken or taken away, we lose an immeasurable part of ourselves.
This sense of dislocation and loss is depicted in the most poignant of ways in Kenneth Branagh’s deeply personal film, Belfast, which he wrote and directed, and which depicts in ways touching and brutally confronting what it was like to grow up in “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland in 1969-70.
Wasting no time setting the scene for those for whom this dark period in British and Irish history is not so much personal as academic, Belfast‘s near-to-opening scene shows a rampaging, baying-for-blood Protestant mob arriving with mindless sound and fury in the largely Protestant street in which nine-year-old boy Buddy (Jude Hill) lives, ready to attack resident Catholics who are being driven out of their homes by a type of urbanised ethnic cleansing (which Catholics also practised upon Protestants).
Followed hard on the heels of blissfully happy scenes of kids playing across the religious divide and decades-long neighbours simply going about their business with friendly waves and warm banter, the scene is terrifying on every count, showing with shocking honesty what it was like to have your peaceful ripped asunder by people who saw only difference and no semblance of community or sense of commonality.
Buddy, who is out play acting as a knight with a garbage can lid and wooden sword, and who is clearly well-loved and known in the neighbourhood – he’s an innately good kid who is brought to shimmeringly loveable life by a highly-talented Hill) – and who has just been called in for supper, along with older brother Will (Lewis McAskie), by his mother (Caitríona Balfe), stands in mute, deer-in-headlights terror as the mob throws rocks and various projectiles around him.
Rescued by his frantic mother, who joins various other parents in rushing their kids to relative safety inside their tightly-packed terrace houses, and who has fend off attacks on Buddy with the garbage lid which has gone from plaything to life-or-death instrument, the young boy is shaken by this ripping apart of his sense of safety and community.
Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) races home from England where he is working as a joiner – unemployment is rife in Northern Ireland, a likely stoker of the incendiary situation which the film brings to agonising life throughout in various ways seditious and openly violent – to his family, walking into a neighbourhood changed by the incident.
With the street sealed off by a paving stone barricade, and entrance and exit strictly regulated by neighbourhood patrols and later British troops, the world of Buddy is changed forever but as Belfast shows in ways that will seize your heart with quiet statement of raw, affecting humanity, it has not been lost in its entirety, though it is, hanging in the balance, primed to fall at any moment as local thugs like Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) menacingly stoke the fire.
At its heart though, and for all its willingness to depict the slow erosion of belonging and place that eats away at Buddy’s family, as well as those elsewhere in the neighbourhood, Belfast is primarily an evocation, and celebration of family, of the way it provides sanctuary, even when it is under considerable stress, in the most dire and troubling of times.
At its very moving epicentre lives and breathes Buddy who is in far-off love with Catholic classmate Catherine (Olive Tennant), who loves his Granny and Pop (Judy Dench and Ciarán Hinds respectively) and who simply wants what any young boy wants which is to play, see his friends and feel warmly encompassed by his tight-knit family.
As evocative as it is searingly incisive, Belfast takes its real power not from the mostly latent, often eruptive brutality and cruelty of its setting, but from the power of love and family to endure, even under great duress, and for neighbourliness to endure even when it is under sustained attack.
Bound up in a family, which like a good many around them, are inclusive and tolerant in a way that people like Clanton can never understand, Buddy’s world is one which stands in direct contrast to the one outside his doors which has surrendered itself to sectarian violence and unthinking violence of the kind which would take decades to play out before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Shot in vividly evocative monochrome, (many of the scenes are jaw-droppingly gorgeous even as they are terrifically intense) which slides into the film after opening aerial shots of Belfast in all its technicolour, modern and peaceful glory, Belfast is a film suffused with love and tenderness and with a palpable sense of the everyday continuing to exist even against the backdrop of the epically, nightmarishly violent.
We see Buddy’s parents arguing over a horrifically large tax bill, which places significant emotional strain on the marriage of his parents, and struggling to make things meet, we witness Buddy going to school and getting into trouble with neighbourhood friends, and the whole family, alive with the rich of normalcy, at the cinema watching One Million Years B.C. or the escapist delights of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where we witness the whole audience lean forward in their seats as Caractacus Pott’s unusual vehicular creation soars off a cliff.
From cheerily domestic chats at his grandparents’ home, where Buddy, bold and friendly but never close to crossing the line into insolence, to Christmas outings to see A Christmas Carol at the theatre with his beloved Gran, Belfast is a nostalgic love letter to a richly loving childhood, lost to a violence which paid no heed to the bonds of neigbour and friend.
It is also testament to the way in which the small but not unimportant minutiae of family and community life plays out even against seismically disruptive events, and how the driving need to preserve that, and to forge a better life, leads people like Buddy’s family to consider if they are not better off leaving for elsewhere?
That is an wrenching piece of contemplation and it sits hovering through almost every scene with Buddy, with whom you can’t help but fall in love as he remains cheekily upbeat, friendly and thoughtful even as his world slowly breaks apart around him, informing a film which evokes and celebrates a strong sense of time and place even as it watches over it slow partial dissolution (or complete if you’re Buddy and having to possibly leave everything you’ve ever known behind).
At its very beating, affecting and thoughtfully meaningful core, Belfast is one of those films which manages to combine the grand sweep of history with the intimacy of close family life, and do so in such a way that it’s impossible not to wonder what we would do if our world was shaking to the core and we had the unenviable choice of staying or going?
What would we do? Belfast agonises over this in ways witty and charming, and confrontingly sad, with its final act providing a powerful answer, one which will tug profoundly at your heartstrings, engage your mind and make you consider how you are defined by where you are, and where you were, and how the loss of that might define you in substantial ways that will resonate through the rest of your life.