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Childhood memories are always in some way mythical, wandering between fact and product of the imagination, monumental in their pettiness and steeped in symbolism. They are a series of specific snippets, those most miraculous, expressive, meaningful or traumatic. It is these snippets that return to us years later to have a profound effect on us.
They returned to Kenneth Branagh, who as a child experienced the glories and shadows of life in a conflict-ridden Ireland. He told us about those experiences in Belfast, and with all the mythical-symbolic-traumatic-miraculous staffage. He told it with the sensitivity of a few years old himself, but with a few decades of mature sass, and it came out beautifully.
The plot of the film takes the audience to the eponymous Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s, plunged into a religious civil war waged by Protestants and Catholics. The protagonist is a young boy named Buddy (Jude Hill) from a Protestant family whose carefree childhood spent learning and playing knights is overtaken with fear when the war riots find him at the door of his own house, on a street he knows like the back of his hand, and in a country that is his whole world.
The perspective of a child in film is still rare, which is a pity, because a child’s perception of the world is diametrically opposed to that of an adult, rationalistic and cool. In Belfast, although this conflict between Catholics and Protestants drives the action, it is not a historical film, and the audience, following the little Buddy, are sort of on the sidelines of the whole situation and hardly ever the action is at the center of it. This is because the little boy doesn’t really understand what is going on around him, no one wants to explain it to him too much, and besides, he has his own childish activities, problems, and goals such as winning the heart of a schoolmate. And that’s great, because it’s beautiful to see how a child functions in difficult times and how those difficulties mix with a child’s imagination and vivid imagination. After all, no adult would see his rioting father as the reincarnation of Sheriff Will Kane from the classic western.
Belfast at High Noon
Speaking of westerns, I’ll admit that the last thing I would have expected in this film was a reference to the western classic, High Noon. However, as they say “no one asked, everyone needed” and it works, because after the screening it turned out that I really needed to experience this beautiful part of childhood fantasy, where a father standing on the street of an Irish housing estate can become a real cowboy from the Wild West. Some will probably find this treatment too infantile or laudatory, but I wish no one thought of it that way. You have to enjoy this treatment as a demonstration of that part of our imagination that we have lost virtually irrevocably with age and with advancing rationalism. Besides, every hard time even in Northern Ireland needs its sheriffs, its cowboys, because injustice like any enemy…never sleeps.
Belfast as a Film About a Family
Family is a mainstay in Belfast, roots, tradition and a collection of interesting personalities. A loving mom (Caitríona Mary Balfe), a cowboy dad (Jamie Dornan), and a tough grandmother (Judy Dench) with a store of life wisdom. The grandfather (Ciarán Hinds), on the other hand, is the archetypal character – an elderly gentleman with a flair for the medical profession, fluent in irony and anecdotes. You like him from the very beginning, because it is impossible otherwise. It is him who makes your heart warm and a smile appear on your face. This grandfather reminds me very much of my own, with whom I have always shared the patch of “owner of too vivid imagination” and who taught me to use it. I guess grandparents have it in them that they are most often such beautiful colored birds, whose colors then scroll through our memories. Belfast, although black and white, didn’t take away the grandfather character’s life color and he is by far the brightest jewel of the film.
Belfast Paradise Lost
Many of Belfast’s residents left the city due to the conflict that was going on there at the time. The little main character also experienced this and it was a cruelly painful stroke for him. It’s no wonder, as none of us would want to leave the land of our childhood and the land we knew and grew up in. It is like snatching a sleepwalker from his sleep – bringing him violently down to earth from the soft clouds. Undoubtedly, the departure from Belfast further intensified in the director’s memories this mythic – romantic status of the city as a paradise lost, as a beloved place brutally taken from him by religious intolerance. It hurt me a lot, as I missed Lublin, which is close to my heart and to which the best memories of my life are connected. I understood the characters’ reluctance to leave the city, I understood their rootedness in it and their fear of being a stranger somewhere far beyond it. Watching it I had my Lublin in my mind’s eye and in my heart a desire to return there as soon as possible.
I don’t know if this is the side effect Branagh was aiming for, but it is impossible to watch this film without longing for something of your own – for the city, for your grandfather, for a pretty schoolmate or for the era when you used to meet cowboys at high noon. Belfast is not just a film about life in the turmoil of war, but an extremely warm, funny, family film, and one from the heart. Kenneth Branagh opened himself up to us, showed us that his childhood was not an easy one, but he told it without any desperate lamentation or tearful narration. He told it with nostalgia, affection and tenderness. He brought his lost paradise back to life, extracted its essence and paid tribute to what shaped him and allowed him to be who he is today.
Photo: press materials
Article: Karina Zapora
English Translation: Natalia Chojnowska
Polish version here
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