Yann Demange's ’71 depicts what are so wildly euphemistically called “the troubles,” the decades of death and violence waged over the British presence in Ireland, but this film differs from most on the subject by featuring a young English soldier on his first deployment as its protagonist. As the film opens, Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) and his regiment are in training. The training is rigorous, but this is peacetime, and the British soldiers think they’re on their way to a fairly quiet assignment guarding the border in Germany, until a superior informs them they’re needed in Belfast. Roughly an hour away by plane, Hook and his fellow soldiers are told how easy they have it, staying in the nation instead of going abroad. However, arriving in Belfast, the soldiers find themselves as occupiers in a city at war, entrenched in a conflict that Hook neither fully understands nor feels any personal stake in.
The regiment’s first mission is described as routine, but it takes them into the Catholic neighborhood, essentially enemy terrain. A frenzied crowd soon develops, violence erupts and Hook and another soldiers leave their protected line to pursue a child who has stolen a rifle. The regiment’s position is soon completely untenable, and they pile into their truck and flee, just as Hook’s fellow soldier is shot through the head. Hook is abandoned, screaming and holding a corpse in hostile territory. He’s only saved from the same fate by a woman’s intervention, but he’s soon on the run, pursued by killers in a city he knows nothing about.
This scenario is basically an inversion of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out and is effective because it offers an outsider's perspective to a conflict that's integral part of Irish upbringing. Hook, on the other hand, is just an orphan who joined up looking for solid pay and doesn’t even know how to answer when he’s asked the fundamental question of Belfast: Catholic or Protestant?
O’Connell continues to prove that he’s an electrifying physical presence on screen, but he’s not swaggering and volatile like his roles in Starred Up or Skins, rather his body language in ’71 is that of a hunted animal in unfamiliar terrain. When he has to use violence, it’s not with the conviction of a soldier, but with the desperation of cornered prey. Director Demange expertly delves into Hook’s subjectivity to allow the audience to feel his physical and emotional torments, while also knowing when to expand the focus to show the machinations surrounding Hook. While at first look the sides of the conflict seem simple – Catholic/Protestant, Irish/Bristish – in fact there are many mutations of those sides.
Most films on this subject are explicitly partisan, but the politics here form more of a general backdrop of intrigue and neither side seems more just than the other. Demange’s ’71 is a heart racing thriller that never lets up, featuring a visceral lead performance by O’Connell in an authentic recreation of ‘70s Belfast. ’71 proves once again the power of historical source material, which here delivers both a compelling story and a strong anti-war message.
