Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, which he wrote and directed, is a sweet, sentimental treatment of a durable cinematic sub-genre: the childhood autobiography.
Branagh spent the first nine years of his life in Northern Ireland, and Belfast tells the story of his formative experiences. Born into a working class Protestant family, he lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood before his father, a handyman, decided to move the family to England to escape the Troubles (aka the Northern Ireland Conflict that began in the late 1960s).
Buddy (Jude Hill) is Branagh’s young alter ego, a plucky, freckled kid who lives on one of those anonymous city blocks where everybody seems to know each other. His placid day-to-day routine is suddenly interrupted by masked rioters tossing Molotov cocktails at Catholic homes. Between the increasingly frequent street violence and the girl in class who becomes the object of his affections, Buddy’s life is upended. The solaces of family, the movie theater, the stage, and the TV set piping in American pop culture, provide a refuge and inform his hard lessons in growing up.
Family dramas have consistently proved to be reliable crowd-pleasers, especially when set against the backdrop of some kind of national conflict. See for instance John Boorman’s Hope & Glory or Alfonso Cuaron’s more recent Roma. Belfast doesn’t distinguish itself from such antecedents so much as slip into its company by way of some familiar tropes: soft black-and-white photography and a series of Golden Oldies evoking the late 1960s, in this case almost exclusively-comprised of Belfast-born rocker Van Morrison tracks.
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