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BLOODY
SUNDAY
6/10
UK/Ireland
2002 : Paul Greengrass : 107 mins
nb: made for British/Irish television, but shown theatrically overseas
A
storming, magnetic performance from James Nesbitt is the main reason to
see this reconstruction of January 30th 1972 in Derry, Northern
Ireland, when 13 unarmed civilians were shot dead by the British army
after a protest march went badly wrong. One of the pivotal events in the
province’s long-running ‘Troubles’ ‘Bloody Sunday’ has never left the
headlines in the UK - 30 years later, when this film was jointly winning
the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, investigations into what
happened and why were still going on.
As
a film, Bloody Sunday shares many strengths and weaknesses with
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk
Down : both are meticulously detailed attempts to convey the minute-by-minute
reality of armed conflict, and while both succeed in terms of immediacy,
they pay a heavy in terms of dramatic coherence. Faced with having to
cram the tumultuous events of a whole day into a couple of hours, Greengrass
jumps around between locations, chopping up the action with repeated use
of sudden blackouts. While the results have the authenticity of newsreel
footage – the production design gets the dingy atmosphere of 1972 spot
on - there’s little opportunity for dramatic rhythms to build up. The
choppiness means the viewer feels progressively distanced from the material.
Most
audiences will know, roughly speaking, how it all ends, and Greengrass’s
attempts to build suspense (by focussing on particular representatives
from each side) feel clumsy, especially an incongruous romantic subplot
featuring hot-headed local teenager Gerry (Declan Duddy). For too long,
it all feels very one-note – though of course, as with Black Hawk Down,
the film-makers can always cite the ‘all’s fair in war’ defence: war is
incoherent, war is chaotic, war is hard to follow.
Greengrass
does have an unambiguous trump card at his disposal, however – Nesbitt’s
unexpected gravity as Ivan Cooper, the civil rights activist who organises
the march and looks on with increasing horror as its spirals out of his
control. We keep cutting back to Cooper at just the right moments throughout
the day, and he finally comes into his own in the moving speech that ends
the film - part valedictory lament, part roar of defiance from a man who
seems completely shattered, physically and mentally. These crucial last
moments are, perhaps, just about strong enough to counterbalance the deficiencies
in the hour and a half that’s gone before. But it’s a close call.
10th
March, 2002
(seen 7th February, Berlinale-Palast, Berlin
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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