The director is the favorite for the Oscar with ‘Belfast’, a friendly and endearing film, which drinks from his memories in the convulsive Northern Ireland of the late 60s
Manu Gómez used his childhood memories in
‘Once upon a time in the Basque Country’, premiered last October, which started with some kids who collected rubber balls after each demonstration. They were free toys, his stripes at 12 years old. ‘Belfast’, which opens in cinemas this January 28, also drinks from the memory of its director, Kenneth Branagh, who was born in the capital of Northern Ireland in 1960. Growing up in the Basque Country during the years of lead and in the middle of the war between Protestants and Catholics has forever marked the filmmakers, who exorcise their past in films ascribed to that genre called ‘coming-of-age’. Both also agree in sweetening their gaze towards turbulent times, in tempering with nostalgia a time when, despite the social and political situation, they were happy.
‘Belfast’, which sounds like an Oscar favorite, begins in color with a drone shot of modern Belfast. Where ships were once built, today stands the imposing Titanic Museum. The hateful graffiti have given way to murals that recall decades of confrontation, terrorist attacks and military occupation. Van Morrison plays (his songs by him do not stop throughout the film) and we return to black and white in 1969. A boy from a Protestant family –Buddy (Jude Hill), Branagh’s ‘alter ego’– plays between the barricades. He attends incendiary sermons at church. He has a crush on the smartest girl in the class. He enjoys the love of his grandparents. “Fucking religion is the problem,” laments an absent father who works in England and wants to stay out of trouble. The family’s dilemma will be to stay while coexistence between Protestants and Catholics breaks down or emigrate to some of the confines of the Commonwealth.
Branagh defends concepts that today, unfortunately, are out of date: working-class pride, family love, neighborhood solidarity, the union of a community. He does not delve into the situation in Northern Ireland because his bet is another: sentimental territory.
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The best moments of ‘Belfast’ belong to those memories of the director. The escape that a movie theater represented, an oasis of shared dreams, in the face of the grayness of everyday life. Branagh inserts snippets from movies like ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, ‘Alone in the Danger’ and ‘A Million Years Ago’. The streets are burning, checkpoints and tanks, but for a nine-year-old boy, day-to-day life involves playing Subbuteo and stealing chocolates from the Pakistani’s store.
Dedicated “to those who left, to those who stayed and to those who were lost”, ‘Belfast’ dips into the syrup on many occasions. Jamie Dornan and the wonderful Caitriona Balfe are the protagonist’s gorgeous parents, while veterans Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds embroider the grandparents. Branagh abuses Van Morrison’s ‘greatest hits’ and even turns a funeral into a blushing musical shtick to the tune of Love Affair’s ‘Everlasting Love’. “We can’t leave, only the crazy ones will remain”, is heard in a nice and endearing tape, a manual ‘feel good movie’ that will dazzle in the United States and that European spectators nursed by Ken Loach’s cinema will contemplate with a kind smile .