Belfast: Kenneth Branagh’s testament film is a journey between cinema and death

Within five years, testament films, as they are affectionately called by insiders, are beginning to invade cinema and platforms, revealing the more intimate side of directors who, up until that moment, had told their lives. in detail only in the interviews, letting something of them permeate their works, but not so transparent as to be recognizable to an inexperienced eye. And so, after Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, Pain and glory by Pedro Almodóvar ed It was the hand of God by Paolo Sorrentino, the time has come Belfastthe film in which Kenneth Branagh, Shakespearean-trained actor and director who in the last decade has rediscovered the mainstream thanks to the adaptations of Agatha Christie, tells about his childhood in Belfast in 1969, marked by armed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and a violent context of which children understand little other than being alert is the best way to get your skin home. Shot in black and white as well as Rome of Cuarón, Belfast is the story of Buddy, a little boy in love with the prettiest schoolgirl in his class who lives unbeknownst to his parents’ moment of greatest crisis, with his father coming back and forth from England to work as a carpenter and his mother pines within the walls of the house in search of comfort and protection.

At some point the solution of emigrate proposed by his father, played by a great Jamie Dornan finally free from Christian Gray’s ghost Fifty Shades of Gray, it seems the only escape route to guarantee the family’s survival, but what would it mean to move and lose contact with a neighborhood and, above all, with a land that for Buddy’s family represents the most precious asset they have in the world? Mom, who has the face of Caitríona Balfedoes not fit, and the resulting conflict leads the union to tremble and slowly break a bubble in which little Buddy, between the fascination for cinema – there is a scene in the film that seems to follow, not too far away, that of Totò looking at the white screen in New Cinema Paradiso – and the advice of grandparents – the sensational Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds – to win the little heart of his partner, he seems to be perfectly at ease, resisting the lure of the violent and remaining faithful to the healthier values ​​of a community that struggles to hold on to its own life.

Thanks to the innocent eyes of Buddy – the little one Jude Hill, that we hope will lead the way -, Kenneth Branagh pays tribute to the city that raised it, to the fortitude of its inhabitants and, above all, to the innate ability to always find the positive side of things even if the sky is overcast and it seems that the light does not filter even through a peephole. Through his nine-year-old alter-ego, Branagh tells the story of him with the innocence typical of children, choosing to build a particularly clean and linear film like Sorrentino did, embellishing it with the amazing photography of Haris Zambarloukos, very good at restoring humanity to a black and white that never becomes flat or depersonalizing. Between the fascination with great classics of cinema as High noon And Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that Buddy-Kenneth runs to watch the cinema whenever he can, and the disruptive force that violence always brings with it, Belfast, which arrives at the cinema on February 24, thanks to the Golden Globe won for the best screenplay and the 7 nominations scrapped at the Oscars, including those for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress to Judi Dench, is a amarcord in an everlasting balance between a saving force and a mortal claw, a human journey that will involve the viewer in the same emotional spectrum that characterized Branagh’s childhood.

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