Belfast is packed with powerful images — shot in Haris Zambarloukos’s majestic black-and-white cinematography (except for a handful of color shots at key moments, notably the escapist windows that film and TV offer the characters) — beginning with an early scene in which the young protagonist, Buddy (Jude Hill), armed with a wooden sword and a shield/dumpster lid, confronts a mob of unionist protestants who come to attack the houses and businesses of Catholics on Buddy’s Street.
In an inferior movie, Buddy would be foolish enough to think that his makeshift weapons could measure up to the rioters’ Molotov cocktails; here, however, it marks precisely the beginning of the end of childhood innocence — a point driven home later by a reading of chapter thirteen of the First Epistle to the Corinthians ("When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but then I became a man and left childish things behind”).
The film’s depictions of violence are doubly effective because Branagh resorts to them sparingly, and when he does, he shoots them in a realistic style; when a car explodes in the middle of the street, you can bet your sweet ass it doesn’t just go up in CGI flames.
The most striking images, however, are those whose composition evokes an air of domesticity; several of them have in common the background presence, as if detached from the action, of Judi Dench. Branagh, who has collaborated with her on almost a dozen productions, knows very well that the veteran actress is able to conjure, simply by virtue of being there, enough gravitas to anchor a scene in the real world (now, this is not to say that Dench is reduced to prop status; quite the contrary, her character provides the emotional center of the history).
These images stay with us because they are all about what is at stake in the film: a fragile lifestyle in which “We have known this street and all the streets around it all our lives. And every man, woman, and child that lives in every damn house, whether we like it or not. And I like it. And you say you have a little garden for the boys? But here, they can play wherever they want, because everyone knows them, everyone loves them, and everyone cares for them.” Establishing this delicate way of life is the reason that the threat of violence is so much more effective in creating tension than the violence itself.
All things considered, Belfast is an episodic slice-of-life-seen-through-a-young-boy’s-eyes that isn’t, believe it or not, a million miles removed from A Christmas Story, and indeed the script introduces a placid, elementary sense of humor that nicely counterbalances the more dramatic material.
