COMING-OF-AGE FILMS DURING CRISES
Many young people grow up in times of civil strife. Two recent films deal with that issue:
Beans, directed by Tracey Deer, focuses on a young teenager nicknamed Beans (played by Kiawentiio), who has a delicate appearance early in the story and grows into a much stronger person due to the influences of her father, mother, and friends. The context is a 78-day protest by the Mohawk tribe of Québec, where the government has proposed in 1990 to allow sacred burial grounds to become a golf course. Mohawks protest, Whites attack them savagely (while accusing them of being savages), and ultimately the Mohawks win the fight to save the Oka region, though just how is not explained. Some archival footage of the Oka Crisis is included in the film, which serves as a window into the ongoing struggle of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Belfast focuses on 8- or 9-year-old Buddy (played by Jude Hill) in the midst of the civil war in Northern Island. The film is a biopic of the director. Although tensions had first emerged between Catholics and Protestants in 1966, an escalation to violence occurred in the year depicted in the film, which begins on August 15, 1969. Soon after filmviewers are introduced to the family, there is a large explosion on their street, where homes of Catholics are destroyed. Afterward, the street is barricaded, and an announcer on television reports that troops are coming from England. Thereafter, Buddy and his Protestant family must adjust to a new reality, as they had been living in peace with their Catholic neighbors. Within a series of scenes, Buddy shows interest in a Catholic girl, Catherine (Olive Tennant). To the dismay of his mother (Caitríona Balfe), Buddy also engages in shoplifting when businesses are attacked in the neighborhood. One of the violence-prone Protestants, Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), threatens Buddy’s father (Ciarán Hinds), who is not keen on joining the civil war. Instead, dad goes to England for work, since Northern Ireland has a high rate of unemployment, and he wants to support his family, which includes his wife, Buddy’s older brother (Lewis McAskie), and two grandparents (Judi Dench and Jamie Dornan). During much of the film, Buddy enjoys a family of good humor that often enjoys entertainment, including music. When the film ends, grandpa has recently died, and granny is deserted by Buddy, his father, mother, and older brother as the nuclear family moves to England. Titles at the end praise those who stayed, those who left, and the martyrs of Belfast.
Historically, the conflict was officially terminated by the Good Friday Agreement 1998, though tensions remain because the most extreme political party representing Protestants did not sign. Scholars now point to the way the British government handled the conflict as a failure because sending armed troops and tanks in fact served to escalate the conflict. The alternative, which would focus on incrementally arresting those committing violence, is depicted during the film as Clanton is arrested, but was not the prevailing method used to stop the conflict. Implications for the intermittent civil war in the United States today are clear, but Belfast makes so such case, having been conceived before the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. MH