Winner of the Audience Award at the last Toronto Film Festival, Belfast, by the very Shakespearean (and sometimes mainstream) Briton Kenneth Branagh, is certainly his most intimate film. The path to Oscar nominations seems assured to him. With an often solid cast, black and white images and admirable photo direction on 35mm film, this plunge into the childhood of the filmmaker in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the midst of a fratricidal conflict, is a chronicle of death and life. .
We think of Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, for the treatment of autobiography, without the power of this major film, on a more tenuous, touching, sensitive, funny and melancholy note. The scenario does not spark, but a door opens, and the wind blows in, showing the daily life of a family in 1969, Protestants and Catholics clashing in a bloody background. However, the film turns out to be more sentimental than political. Leave or stay there when everything is shattering around you? The question is nevertheless posed, throbbing, leaving the spectator to answer it.
Little Jude Hill candidly embodies Buddy, an intelligent but angelic child with large, pure eyes set on a world that is hardly pure. His carpenter father (Jamie Dornan), charmer, manipulator, often absent, in debt, relies on a devoted woman (Caitriona Balfe).
Everything takes place at the height of a blond child, under songs and period music (Van Morrison throne as champion), in a work that is also a classic passage from childhood to pre-adolescence: crush on a neighbor, joys of football, various curiosities often overlooked. Add several outings to the cinema testifying by the band of the first cinephilic course of Branagh.
The grandparents, played by Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds, hot figures of experience, color and affection, dominate the general game. The death of the grandfather will be an opportunity for the little boy to learn to tame his losses.
Between the gangsterism which disturbs their lives when money is involved, the burning of the homes of minority Catholics by Protestant fanatics, the real charm of Belfast nevertheless rests on the everyday life which continues its course, for- beyond the nightmare climate. At school, in the street, especially within this extended family where three generations live together, the filmmaker paradoxically testifies to a happy childhood, because surrounded by love, through scenes of dance, songs, sport, of games, of laughter. Violence fueled by flames, threats, tanks filled with soldiers punctuates a weave of gentleness.
Haris Zambarloukos’ skillful and inventive camera gives the film its breath and rhythm, with an opening capturing chaos in fury then returning to the light of day through Buddy’s gaze, to the little pleasures allowing him to live his childhood, Nevertheless. There is something tender and unfinished in Belfast. A tone is sought, a benevolence stretches, but the film of Branagh touches many fibers. Its beauty and its contrasts speak to the senses and the mind. That he did not fall into the sinistrosis by approaching such a troubled period in Northern Ireland is to be paid to the account of the great generosity of a filmmaker.