American critics have made note of strong Northern Irish accents in Kenneth Branagh’s latest film – but is there really a problem here?
Credit: Focus Features
Earlier this week, Kenneth Branagh’s latest film as director – Belfast – debuted at the Venice Film Festival. It’s also going to be popping up at London’s Film Festival in October too ahead of its wider release, and it promises to be something very close to his heart. On the surface, it’s his most personal film to date, a small independently-funded production that he’s slotted in around much bigger projects (such as the completed and still-to-be-released Death On The Nile, now due in February).
Belfast – that he’s also written – is set in 1960s Northern Ireland, and is described as a ‘poignant story of love, laughter and loss in one boy’s childhood’. It’s not being expressly sold as autobiographical, but conversely nobody is pushing back and suggesting it isn’t. It tells of a family at the start of the Troubles, and the first wave of reviews have been handsome.
But what a small selection of those responses have highlighted too is the strength of the accents in the film. In particular, a review in Hollywood trade bible Variety has drawn ire.
Not for admitting its writer was unaware that Branagh was born in Northern Ireland, but instead for the next sentence: “Maybe that’s because his family got out and moved to Reading, England, when he was 9 years old, just as the Troubles were coming to a boil, which spared him the accent and what could have been a premature end”, the piece read, albeit broadly praising of the feature.
I’d personally suggest more people struggled to hear the dialogue in Tenet than missed chunks of something like Trainspotting
“Spared him the accent”, understandably, hasn’t gone down well.
It’s The Hollywood Reporter meanwhile that’s suggested the accents in the film are thick to the point of difficult to follow. “This is a movie that would definitely benefit from subtitles”, it argues, presumably for its American release.
We’ve been down this road before; that certain productions originating from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland are deemed difficult to understand by American film critics and studio executives, with rarely the complaint coming directly from the audience. I’d personally suggest more people struggled to hear the dialogue in Christopher Nolan’s recent movie Tenet than missed chunks of something like Trainspotting, but maybe that’s just me.
Still, it’s Danny Boyle’s 1996 classic that such discussions – including this one – tend to gravitate towards. There’s an urban myth surrounding Trainspotting, the film that put Boyle firmly on the map following his breakthrough with Shallow Grave. That the thickness of the Scottish accents in it were said to be enough to cause conversations about potentially subtitling the film for its American release. Possibly even redubbing it.
Trainspotting
This caused much chortling in the UK, but nobody ever found the fire to go with the smoke. As Danny Boyle would tell Amy Raphael in their collected book of interviews, “there was a great story that the Weinsteins, who were distributing the film in North America, decided to have the film revoiced”.
He implied strongly this would have been done behind the backs of the filmmakers. “They didn’t do it in New York and LA because they knew we’d be there on the press tour”, adding, “but everywhere else it was dubbed into American. At least those were the rumours”.
It’s hard to find anyone who’s actually seen – or more to the point, heard – such a cut though. Whilst Boyle said that one of his cast – Jonny Lee Miller – had met an American actor who claimed to have dubbed him, “we never found any real evidence”.
This caused much chortling in the UK, but nobody ever found the fire to go with the smoke
It might just be one of those things where the possibility it may be true is more use to the film’s publicity than, well, it being true.
With Belfast – a film for which there’s early whisperings of Oscar talk – The Guardian has already run a piece suggesting this might all be, to lean on another Branagh movie, much ado about nothing. It’s hard to argue with its suggestion that within minutes, audiences get used to an accent anyway, and are soaked in the film. Bottom line: don’t expect Belfast to cede to a critical request, but don’t believe either this was an actual story in the first place. Trainspotting teaches us that.
Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench, Ciaran Hinds and Caitriona Balfe lead the ensemble for the film anyway, and it’s getting a wide cinema release in the UK on November 12th. By those early responses, it’s worth keeping an ear out for.
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