Less than a month later Death on the Nile, a new Kenneth Branagh arrives on the screens in express, in the form of a priori the antithesis to his luxurious adaptation of Agatha Christie. Belfast is therefore a prestigious film (seven Oscar nominations), set in the director’s childhood memories and the beginning of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969 between Catholics and Protestants.
Branagh’s double is Buddy, 9, waking up to all aspects of life at the time – falling in love with his classmate, enduring rains of pebbles and cobblestones, listening to all of Grandpa’s good advice. and granny who are necessarily full of them. The sumptuous black and white, the autobiographical component and the ostentatious camera are reminiscent of the nostalgic splendor of the Roma by Alfonso Cuaron. But Branagh is much too agitated, impatient like Buddy, to make his sequence shots last for them to make a lasting mark. He quickly goes from cock to donkey as soon as he sketches his frame or an idea: it is enough to compare how Branagh and Cuarón both film a riot, to the advantage of the second who knows how to apprehend his space, to pass with fluidity from a store on the street. Vain confusion, as in the Hercule Poirot filmed by Branagh, and which ultimately hides simple emotions, if not very simplified (basically, “dad will always be there for you”). When Roma magnified its main character as a handyman in a bourgeois house like the proles at Pasolini, Belfast has a narrower meta-textual perspective: that of TV series (Star Trek, Sentinels of the Air) and films (Raquel Welch in a prehistoric bikini in One million years BC, The train will whistle three times) that young Buddy gorges on.
sugar mountains
If it has no claim to be a documentary on the troubles of the time, the film is completely looped on imagery more or less telephoned, expected, coming precisely from the cinema. Dad and mom are Hollywood handsome and throw dishes in their faces in the middle of an argument like in a household scene from the golden age of the studios. Where the confrontation between the heroic dad and the villain is staged and resolved as in a western duel. It’s all show for Buddy (and therefore, Branagh): “Thank you very much, it was very good”, he summarizes, impressed, following having attended the fiery sermon of a sweaty pastor. After all, why not, especially when you want to place yourself at the height of a child. But the great works on childhood have for their protagonists the salty and mineral taste of the adult world and its intricacies (randomly to take the greatest, the Night of the hunter, the 400 Blows Where the lament of the path).
If the sincerity of Branagh is undeniable, it covers any beginning of bitterness under mountains of sugar. Buddy is cute, his family is cute, and it all depends on the viewer’s level of glucose tolerance. Her grandma says cherish Lost horizons (1937) by Frank Capra, where shines in the Himalayas an idyllic city called Shangri-La (a romantic invention of James Hilton in Lost Horizon). This Belfast has the same substance as Branagh, who fled Northern Ireland for England at the same time without ever returning, idealizes it. In this neat and well-groomed film like his kid, it’s hard to be daring in what was, on paper, to be his great retrospective utopia.