Belfast tale avoids a history lesson
Director Yann Demange has been fielding questions all day about ’ 71, his first feature film that’s set in Belfast in 1971.
His favourite, from a journalist who had 10 minutes with him: Could he sum up The Troubles?
Not likely. The violence that engulfed Ireland, Northern Ireland and the rest of the U. K. in the last three decades of the 20th century stemmed from a complicated stew of ethnicity, nationalism, politics, religion, colonialism and, of course, power.
Growing up in England in the 1980s, the 37- year- old director was aware of the conflict. But as a child of immigrants, he says, “It was a white noise. Like background. I didn’t understand it at all.”
But when he read the screenplay by Gregory Burke, he had what he can only describe as a visceral experience.
“I’d had no desire to tell a story about Northern Ireland,” he says. “I thought Steve McQueen had the last word on it,” referring to the 2008 film Hunger, about hunger striker Bobby Sands. But ’ 71 changed his mind.
But just as he couldn’t deliver a 10- minute precis on The Troubles to a journalist, he didn’t want to attempt it on film either.
“I didn’t want to take people to school,” he says. “I wanted it to be something experiential.”
The film opens with scenes of British soldiers training for deployment in Berlin, and then being told they’re headed to Belfast in Northern Ireland “because of the deteriorating security situation.” And off they go.
“A 90- minute film is not the proper place to give a lecture into the complexity of The Troubles,” said Demange. “I wanted to tell a human story.”
The face of that story is Gary Hook, a young British soldier, played by Jack O’Connell, who gets separated from his unit and must survive a night in the shifty terrain of Belfast, where just crossing a street could take one from a loyalist area into a republican stronghold.
O’Connell, who also stars in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, was conscious of not trying to lead or educate the audience.
“A lot of the film happens around Gary,” he says. “He’s just reacting. I just had to know whether we were making a hero or whether we were portraying a human. I was much more interested in the latter.”
He credits Demange with helping him achieve that balance.
O’Connell was born in 1990 and raised in Derby in the East Midlands region of England, so The Troubles are more or less history to him.
He left his opinions behind to take on the role of Gary.
“We’re not portraying a war where everyone was politically minded and everyone had beliefs. You had a lot of British going over there only as a method of employment.”
Or, as Demange puts it, there were many Britons who signed up with visions of driving on the Autobahn and meeting German girls.
“They didn’t even know where Belfast was,” he says. “And the key players were 22. They’re boys.”