Beautiful Black and White: Passing & Belfast

If, like me, you love classic cinema, you are always cautiously optimistic when a modern movie comes out that is filmed in black and white. Is it a gimmick? Yes. But is it often deployed to wondrous effect, particularly given advances in cinematography and digital film? Yes. So today I present to you two new movies that are shot in black and white for very different but equally fascinating reasons.

Passing: Written and directed by Rebecca Hall (this is her directorial debut as she joins the ranks of actresses turning into directors, a trend I fully support), based on the novel by Nella Larsen, this is a quiet but tense movie about two Black women in 1920s New York, one of whom is light-skinned enough to be “passing” as white. The movie begins when Irene (Tessa Thompson) runs into Clare (Ruth Negga) downtown at a swanky Manhattan hotel. Clare recognizes Irene and comes over to have a glorious reunion with this woman she hasn’t seen since high school. The trouble is, Clare is pretending to be white, while Irene has merely been indulging in a wild moment to see if she can “pass” in this hotel, but is otherwise a very proud Black woman who lives up in Harlem with her “dark” husband and children.

What follows is a fraught story of a tenuous friendship that is based on lies from its very foundation, and is perpetually dancing on a razor’s edge of danger and destruction. Clare is married to a racist white man (played by Alexander Skarsgard, in an inspired bit of casting for the “whitest man alive”), but her reunion with Irene reminds her of how much she misses Black culture and freely hanging out with her own people. So she keeps coming up to Harlem and starts insinuating herself into Irene’s life in increasingly problematic ways that make Irene start to question her own life. And of course, there is the constant thrum of the question of “the race problem” in America, with Irene and her husband struggling with how to help their sons deal with racial abuse casually hurled at them in school or on the streets, and whether they should leave the country altogether. 

Shooting this movie in black and white is a very literal choice - after all, it’s about the state of Black and white people in America. But the cinematography and lighting has such a lot of technical wizardry and thought behind it. In scenes where the women were “passing,” the filmmakers would flood the sets with light so that it would be difficult to ascertain the actors’ skin color. There is so much psychological and physical nuance to play with in this story, and both Thompson and Negga are incredible at capturing all the struggles these characters face, not just because of their Blackness, but also because they are women. Clare is in such a dangerous position - she technically has everything she could want because she married a rich white man, but she will be destroyed if he ever finds out her true identity. The notion that she spent her entire pregnancy in a wretched state because she had to pray her child would be born light-skinned is horrific to contemplate. This woman has made the ultimate deal with the devil and as the movie progresses, you will get to see how that deal turns out and the toll it takes on the people around her. This story may be from the 1920s, but its themes are just as relevant today where racism and colorism continue to run rampant. So settle in and watch Passing. You will have a lot of food for thought.

Belfast: Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh (another actor turned director!), this is a very personal original screenplay based on his childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the agonizing decisions his family had to make as to whether or not they would have to leave Belfast and all the people they loved. Despite the heavy subject matter and all the chaos and rioting unfolding on screen, the movie is surprisingly light and deft because it is told from the perspective of 9-year old Buddy (the wondrous Jude Hill, who is going to pick up all manner of Young Artist awards this year). Even the camera angles are often designed to show you this world from a child’s vantage point, because you’re always looking up at things or having the adults loom over you while they talk. 

Speaking of the adults, Jaime Dornan and Caitriona Balfe play Buddy’s parents, while Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench are his grandparents. That’s some all-star casting right there, and they are all magnificent, particularly Balfe who has to carry the heft of being a woman raising two sons in the middle of all this chaos while her husband only comes in every other weekend as he’s working on jobs in England and trying to make enough money to support the family. This couple is struggling and you get to see the emotional decisions and fights that are taking place as they try to protect their family amidst all the sectarian violence. They are Protestants, but they live on a street with a lot of Catholic folk that they love and consider family. However, they are increasingly being pressured to join violent Protestant gangs and the entire situation is unfathomable.

Throughout this tension, however, Buddy is just being a regular kid, struggling to do well on his homework to impress and (literally) get close to a smart girl in his class, and indulging in his love for movies, TV, and theater that heralds the future Sir Kenneth Branagh that he will become some day. At one point, there’s a scene of Buddy avidly reading a Thor comic and it made me laugh as that was a clear homage to Branagh directing the first Thor movie for Marvel, which at the time felt like an odd choice for the mostly Shakespeare-focused thespian. 

The black and white cinematography in this movie is simply sumptuous, capturing the nostalgia and beauty of this time despite all the hardship, and I don’t think any of these actors have ever looked better. It’s an odd thing to say, but I’ve never been more aware of how blue their eyes are than when I saw how clear they looked in black and white. And I love nothing more that looking at a beautiful old wrinkled face in black and white - God bless Judi Dench, but her wrinkles and un-Botox’d face have never looked lovelier on the big screen. However, this movie does periodically have color: when Buddy is at the movies watching something in glorious technicolor, or watching a theater production. The effect makes it clear that this is when his world comes alive, and no matter all the heartbreak and angst going on around him in the quotidian sufferings of mankind, he can always escape to these places to find worlds that are new and exciting and joyous. 

Ultimately, Belfast is a glorious cinematic memoir, a perfect encapsulation of why Branagh became the man he did, and a loving ode to his childhood and the people who suffered so much through the Troubles. This movie is probably the first time I have seen an insider’s account of how it felt at the time and all the religious rhetoric and human idiocy that went into the escalating tensions. The movie’s dialogue can get a little hokey in places, and Buddy’s family can often seem quite saintly in their tolerance and common sense approach to religion and other human divisions. But in our increasingly frayed and polarized times, this film is a welcome reminder that humans have always sown unnecessary discord amongst themselves, and what we really need is to move beyond that and recognize our common humanity. Stop fighting each other and go watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That’s my biggest takeaway from watching Belfast.