Kenneth Branagh has directed a handful of decent features in his uneven 30-plus years behind the camera, but Belfast is his first truly great film. Set in 1969, this autobiographical coming-of-age drama revisits a crucial crossroads moment in the actor-director’s boyhood, growing up in the Northern Irish capital just as simmering sectarian tensions between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists exploded into the long, bloody conflict commonly dubbed The Troubles. The backstory may be dark but this personal passion project is humane and lyrical, a fondly nostalgic paean to family and roots, childhood innocence and tight-knit community values. Branagh reportedly wrote and shot his most personal film to date in just a few months last year while the Covid pandemic stalled his other projects, including the long-delayed release of his ill-fated Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile.
A nimble, witty script and rich ensemble cast, including Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench, are strong selling points here. The child-focussed narrative viewpoint and sumptuous monochrome visuals invoke Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winner Roma (2018), although the Proustian comfort-food tone is closer to British memoir films like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987) or Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). World premiered in Telluride and Toronto, where it won the People’s Choice audience prize, Belfast is screening at the London Film Festival this week. Set for theatrical release in November, this heart-warming crowd-pleaser already feels like a surefire awards contender, even if Branagh’s fondness for feel-good glibness over bittersweet complexity sometimes lets him down. Non-British viewers may also struggle with the broad accents and lack of background context.
The emotional focus and obvious Branagh surrogate here is Buddy (Jude Hill), a nine-year-old-schoolboy whose dreams are fired by cowboy movies, Star Trek, the first moon landing and a budding interest in the mysterious allure of girls. Buddy, his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) and their parents Ma and Pa (Dornan and Catriona Balfe) live on a street of tightly huddled houses in a working-class, largely Protestant area of Belfast. This mixed-faith neighbourhood seems to rub along harmoniously, until one incendiary day in the summer of 1969 when organised gangs attack the street’s minority Catholic families. Their goal is ethnic cleansing, escalating centuries of Anglo-Irish tension into civil war.
As Dornan’s Pa is a skilled tradesman who works in England much of the year, it mostly falls to Buddy’s mother and grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds) to school the boy in how to avoid sectarian violence and its thuggish advocates. As the streets around his home come to resemble a war zone of makeshift barricades, military vehicles and burned-out cars, Buddy remains innocently unaware of the spiralling dangers. When an anxious Pa proposes emigrating somewhere safer, he meets tearful resistance across the board. But as normal life becomes untenable, and menacing paramilitary gangsters start demanding “cash or commitment” from the community, the family face some agonisingly tough choices about their future.
Closely observed domestic stories like Belfast depend heavily on good casting, and Branagh’s team generally excel themselves here. With a moon-faced, wide-eyed naturalism that seems to belong to another century, Hill is a superb discovery as Buddy, conveying just the right degree of naive sweetness without succumbing to studied child-star cuteness. Dornan gets to use his native Northern Irish accent and radiate maximum Hot Dad charm, but Balfe effortlessly outshines him with a revelatory, emotionally charged, Cate Blanchett-level performance.
Dench and Hinds, with their heavyweight acting chops, bring reliably juicy texture to their choral double-act roles, dispensing salty humour and autumnal wisdom like tragicomic characters from a Samuel Beckett play. That said, Dame Judi’s wobbly accent does wander around the map a little, from Dublin to Edinburgh and all points in between. Keen-eyed fans of Branagh’s screen portfolio will note the pleasing cameos from long-time friends including Michael Maloney and John Sessions, a key catalyst for this project, who died unexpectedly last year soon after shooting wrapped.
Branagh has worked with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos consistently over the last 15 years, but Belfast is their most imaginative collaboration to date. Though it is bookended by contemporary colour footage of the city in its current tourist-friendly peacetime mode, the bulk of the film is shot in ravishing, fine-grained, lustrous monochrome that feels both achingly nostalgic and timelessly chic. Bursts of colour play a poetic role in the narrative, notably when Buddy is gorging on big-screen escapist fantasies like One Million Years BC (1966) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Zambarloukos also makes repeated use of strong vertical divides and rectangular framing devices, lending a cool modernist elegance to the film’s visual grammar, enriching and expanding a story that largely takes place within a single street location.
As ever, Branagh is sometimes guilty of trite choices and sentimental short cuts. Fellow Belfast native Van Morrison may be the obvious candidate to provide the film’s retro soundtrack of mostly vintage tunes, but his involvement borders on lazy cliche, like using a Beatles jukebox to score a Liverpool-set drama. A pleasantly diverting but incongruous musical number seems to have been included purely to show off Dornan and Balfe’s song-and-dance skills. And a scene in which Dornan’s unarmed Pa defeats a gun-toting gangster, which pays winking homage to High Noon (1952), stretches magical thinking to breaking point.
The lack of any historical or political context is also slightly baffling. Indeed, some would argue that making an apolitical film about the Troubles is a political act in itself. The screenplay’s syrupy homilies about how divided communities can get along by showing each other mutual respect are perfectly admirable, but they conveniently ignore centuries of contentious colonial misrule in Ireland. In fairness, not every Northern Irish story needs to dwell on the region’s much-covered bloody past. Branagh has made a light, upbeat comedy-drama rooted in dark, depressing events. That is no crime. It helps considerably that Belfast is his best film yet, joyous and heartfelt and bursting with beauty.
Director, screenwriter: Kenneth Branagh
Cast: Jude Hill, Jamie Dornan, Caitriona Balfe, Judi Dench, Ciarán Hinds, Lewis McAskie, Lara McDonnell, Colin Morgan
Producers: Laura Berwick, Kenneth Branagh, Becca Kovacik, Tamar Thomas
Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos
Editor: Una Ni Dhonghaile
Production designer: Jim Clay
Costume designer: Charlotte Walter
Music: Van Morrison
Casting: Lucy Bevan, Emily Brockman
Production companies: Northern Ireland Screen (UK), TKBC (UK)
Venue: London Film Festival (special gala screening)
In English
98 minutes
