Yann Demange (2014)
It was especially interesting to watch Yann Demange’s debut feature just a day after The Cut. ’71 is visually kinetic and the story, set mostly in Belfast during the Troubles, is both strongly rooted in the particular conflict that triggers the action and mediated through a convincingly individualised central character. These are all qualities unfortunately lacking in Fatih Akin’s film. Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) is a young soldier from Derbyshire. ’71 begins with a montage that describes the military training that he and others undergo. They’re expecting, on completion of the training, to be stationed in Germany but the worsening situation in Northern Ireland (the film’s title refers, I assume, simply to the year 1971) sends them to Belfast instead. Demange and Gregory Burke, who wrote the screenplay, set the scene there naturally and efficiently, imparting essential information about the sectarian geography of the city through a lecture given by a senior officer to the newly-arrived soldiers. Within a few screen minutes, the unit of which Hook is a member is caught up in a street riot that develops from a house-to-house search for weapons in the Falls Road area. Hook and another soldier are separated from their colleagues; this other soldier is shot dead and Hook is pursued by his killers through backstreets and alleyways before taking temporary refuge in an outdoor toilet. From this point onwards, ’71 is, in narrative terms, the story of how Gary Hook – unsure in the first place what he’s doing in Northern Ireland, now traumatised and disoriented – tries to get back to the barracks where his unit is based.
The plotting of the story, once Hook is alone, is designed so that he survives a series of close shaves; Demange and Burke ratchet up the drama by describing tensions both within the IRA and between uniformed and undercover British soldiers – and how these tensions boil over and converge so as to intensify Hook’s perilous predicament. There’s a risk with this kind of material and treatment that a film will turn ‘thrillery’ but the strength of the characters, especially Hook, and Demange’s direction combine to ensure that ’71 very rarely loses its particularity. The hand-held camerawork in the street riot sequences may be excessive but, as well as enhancing the sense of frightening disorder, it gives increased impact to the moments when the camera movement slows down, as it does before the horrifying death of Hook’s fellow soldier. ’71 is almost relentlessly violent, either physically or verbally and sometimes both at the same time. The dramatic salience of key acts of violence – the shooting of the soldier, the detonation of a bomb in a Unionist pub, Hook’s fatal stabbing of an IRA man in an act of self-defence – is remarkable in the circumstances. Demange, with the help of his cinematographer Tat Radcliffe, also does a fine and shocking job of locating the war zone within urban streets, the terraced houses and bars, where families live otherwise ‘normal’ lives.
Without overdoing it, Yann Demange and Gregory Burke make some incisive comments about the background of Gary Hook and young men like him who join up. There’s a kind of gruesome adventure holiday atmosphere to the scenes in which the young recruits are doing their training. Before he goes to Belfast, Gary takes his younger brother, who’s in care, out for the day. A remark to Gary from one of the staff, when the boy is returned late, makes clear that Gary himself used to be in the same or a similar institution. When the army unit first arrives for the house-to-house search, one of the children in the street shows what he thinks of the soldiers by mooning: Gary’s amused by this – it’s almost as if it’s the kind of cheeky thing he might have done himself as a kid. At one point, an IRA man whose responsibility as a doctor takes precedence as he stitches a wound in Gary’s side, explains that he was an army medical officer for twenty years and tells the patient that the British army is about ‘posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts’. However much or little you agree with the sentiment, the line keeps ringing in your head for the remainder of ’71.
Jack O’Connell, much praised for his performance in Starred Up (which I’ve not yet seen), is outstanding as Gary Hook. O’Connell is luminously ordinary – he’s excellent at suggesting a young man who doesn’t know much but feels more. There’s good work in the supporting cast from, in particular, Sam Reid, as the well meaning, literal-minded lieutenant in charge of Hook’s unit. Sean Harris is, of course, a powerful presence as Browning, the undercover army captain, but both he and Demange may be a bit too aware of this: as soon as Harris appears, the director moves the camera onto him – the effect is too deliberate and Harris might have been stronger if he’d played the role a shade less aggressively. Richard Dormer, although effective enough as Eamon, the IRA man who tends Hook, is a limited actor. Some of the playing of the smaller parts, especially in the training camp before the soldiers go to Northern Ireland, isn’t that great but the actors concerned come and go very quickly.
A few things in the plotting and storytelling are, respectively, improbable or unclear. When Eamon and his daughter Brigid (Charlie Murphy) find Gary lying wounded on a street corner, the father says he can’t leave him there: Eamon shows incredible physical strength to carry Gary back to the family home and into Brigid’s bedroom. Nearly all the action takes place between dusk one winter’s afternoon and daybreak the following morning; I didn’t therefore understand the placing of a short scene when Gary gets inside a flat and finds himself face to face with a young girl, who doesn’t appear to have gone to bed yet. In a postscript to the Belfast story, Gary returns, in uniform, to the care home and collects his brother; the final shots show them sitting side by side on a coach, with Gary now in civvies – I wasn’t sure if this meant he’d left the army or if this was just another day out with the younger boy during leave. Overall, though, ’71 is impressive. Yann Demange shows a lot of skill in balancing the political history and action film ingredients and he’s greatly helped by Jack O’Connell’s ability to make Gary Hook both typical and individual.
13 October 2014
