And it’s true that the RUC man who calls on Buddy’s home to question him about nicking a bar of Turkish Delight from Mr Singh’s corner shop would have been a lot less friendly if he’d been visiting a house in the Lower Falls. One complaint about the film is that it ignores the origins of the violence in the ill-treatment of Catholics by the state. As threats from the paramilitaries escalate, emigration becomes inevitable. Inside Belfast is a Ken Loach movie about Ma deciding whether she can leave these tight-knit streets to start a new life in Canada or Australia (Pa gets the brochures). There is a sense of opportunity in the air that anyone brought up at the time in a working-class city will remember. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. Buddy fears he is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Domestic tensions are compounded by larger shifts in the culture.
Contact with the old folks helps stabilise Buddy’s household despite money worries and the strain of Pa working away. His own father is a ‘deep thinker’, who has seen a bit of the world and quotes Yeats, while his mother, played by Judi Dench (with an erratic Belfast accent), is enduringly supportive. Pa isn’t a one-off: this is a film about family values and how they are passed on. When a loyalist gunman pressures him to join up or pay protection money, he refuses. ‘There is no our side and their side on our street,’ Pa tells his sons. But the joke points to a deeper resistance to sectarianism. A British soldier quips that he hopes Pa isn’t a joiner in one of the new armed groups: there was a UVF bombing campaign in 1969 and it was the year the Provisional IRA was founded. Buddy, the Branagh figure, played by Jude Hill, lives with his older brother and hard-pressed mother (Catríona Balfe), while his father (Jamie Dornan) comes and goes: he works as a joiner in England.
Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency.Īt the heart of Belfast is a version of Branagh’s own Protestant family in 1969. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob.
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