Heartfelt tribute to a beseiged city with spirit yet defiantly undimmed

This superbly directed film, shot in elegant monochrome, is a nostalgic and fiercely affectionate paean to a city that shaped its director in his heart and soul.

Buddy, played by the adorable and wide-eyed Jude Hill, is a double for the young Ken, who, while crushing on the smartest girl in his class, and simply wanting to enjoy trips to the cinema to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and play in the street with a fake sword and a bin lid, struggles to understand why violence breaks out so suddenly and inexplicably, as he looks up with wonder at his Pa, played masterfully and with real sensitivity by Jamie Dornan, who refuses to be drawn into the persecution of his Catholic neighbours, and emerges as the moral centre of the piece, alongside Catriona Balfe’s stoical and beautiful Ma.

Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench are profoundly affecting as Buddy’s grandparents, full of earthy, Ulsterish wit and tenderness, even as the community outside their humble terraced abode becomes mired in internecine strife.

The warmth and humour shared among the family at epicentre of the film stands in stark contrast to the street vigilantes who will no longer tolerate the Catholics among them.

There is a wonderful moment where Pop (Hinds) is helping Buddy with his maths homework.

Pop, ailing in health, tells him to make his answers blurry, to keep the teacher guessing, he might get marked up or down, but does he want to impress his would-be classroom sweetheart or not? Still, Buddy wants to know the right answer. “If there were a right answer son, and we all knew it, would they be doing what they’re doing out there?” he muses.

Some may find Branagh’s liberally applied doses of sugar to a narrative about the birth of Belfastian tragedy something of a sentimental gloss over the true horrors of 1969, but actually what Branagh achieves here is heroic and defiant: as those who chose violence raged, life still found a way, love triumphed over hatred in most homes and nothing could quell the fundamental spirit of the right-thinking members of both communities.

We’ve all seen gritty films about the Troubles that besieged Belfast, but what Branagh is really saying is that through the eyes of a young boy living with a loving family who protected him, it was still shot through with magic, wonder and people who did not care about who was Catholic or Protestant or neither.

Certainly Dornan’s Pa tells Buddy that it doesn’t matter if the girl he loves is a “Catholic or a Hindu or a vegetarian Antichrist” because Everlasting Love (on the soundtrack compiled by Van Morrison) is an inextinguishable flame, indeed as Morrissey might say, a light that never goes out.

RATING: 4/5

Belfast is in cinemas now.