The British film industry never found a Vietnam-type genre in the violence of Northern Ireland, maybe because there wasn’t the same sense of us and them: the republicans were never as far-off and exotically faceless as Hollywood considered the Viet Cong to be. But this traumatic era – almost over, but not quite – might yet prove a rich seam. Screenwriter Gregory Burke and first-time feature director Yann Demange have made a cracking movie debut with ’71, a behind-enemy-lines war movie reeking with bad blood and bad faith, perhaps best described as an action-conspiracy thriller. It is interestingly free of the tone that dramas about the Troubles traditionally assume: a tone that you might call tragical correctness.
The film is set in west Belfast in the early years of the conflict, a year before Bloody Sunday; a time when Northern Ireland was still routinely referred to on television news as “the province”, like an outpost of the Roman empire.
Its central figure is played by Jack O’Connell, a terrific actor with the charisma of a young Albert Finney. He is Gary, an English lad from Derbyshire who has joined the Parachute Regiment, and who perhaps finds in the army the comforts of a replacement family. At the beginning of the decade, he is shipped out to Belfast, where the army must participate in the fiction of being merely present to assist the civilian police (the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as they were then called) in their duties, rather than directly imposing martial law.
A house-to-house search off the Falls Road goes horribly wrong; the resulting confrontation triggers a riot situation in which Gary is left behind by his retreating unit. He finds himself in a no-man’s-land where that well-honed phrase “the enemy within” appears to apply both to friend and foe. It is a world in which the authorities are running high-level informers and supplying arms to loyalist paramilitaries to maintain a deniable, proxy war. Gary’s commanding officer, Lt Armitage (Sam Reid), finds himself at odds with the furtive, plain-clothes intelligence operative Captain Browning (Sean Harris); and the Provisionals’ fiercely committed Haggerty (Martin McCann) and the eerily blank-faced Sean (Barry Keoghan) are plotting against their own chiefs. Meanwhile, a former army doctor on the republican side may be Gary’s only chance: he is Eamon, played by Richard Dormer (notable for his excellent portrayal of Terri Hooley, the punk music promoter in Good Vibrations).
