'71: CALL discussion notes

                     ’71   — director Yann Demange

Background. “The Troubles”: Northern Ireland was split between the mainly Catholic Republican faction that wanted independence from Britain and the mainly Protestant Loyalist opposition. In 1971 the British forces suffered their first fatalities and the rebel IRA was about to make its mark with Bloody Sunday.

The film: After a riot in 1971 Belfast a young British soldier, Gary Hook, is separated from his unit, due to his tactically idealistic (i.e., well-meaning idiot) commanding officer’s incompetence. He spends the night threading the IRA’s hostile streets, unable to distinguish enemy from ally (Both sides wear green). In addition to fleeing the violent IRA Provos, after encountering an undercover British paramilitary force he has to evade them, too. Hook lucks into a precocious 9-year-old urchin (a Loyalist whose father was killed by the IRA) who shows him through secret passages. A pub bomb takes the kid’s arms and wounds Hook, who’s saved by a Catholic medic and his daughter.

Consider these questions:

1. Aristotle distinguished between “history” — the particulars that happened on one specific occasion — and the superior “fiction” — universal patterns that recur time and again. What qualifies this film for “fiction”? That is, rather than being just about there and then, what makes it about here and now?
2. How is the song, Elmore James’s “The Sky is Crying,” relevant? The last shot?
3. What’s the thematic effect of the pacing and the handheld camera?
4. Why does Hook suffer a graduation of violence, from training to physical assault, to a bombing, to an administrative abuse?
5. How do the opening scenes encapsulate the film’s themes? 
6. How are the opposing sides in this war characterized?
7. Why do both sides wear green? (Remember, you’re analyzing a film.)
8. Why is the raw recruit hero named Hook?
9. What is the point of rebel teenager Sean, as young and naive as Hook, assigned to kill him? How is Sean characterized? How does he compare to the 9-year-old and to Hook’s kid brother? What’s the point in this pattern?
10. What’s the relation between the two daughters, the medic’s and the homeowner’s (where Hook takes brief refuge)?
11. What’s the significance of Hook’s last actions? How does the film’s end relate to its opening?
12. What’s the point of the film’s colour scheme?
13. What thematic function is served by all the children? 
14. Why make the film now? (i)From the Irish/British perspective? (ii) From us outsiders’?
15. How is the film “disarming”?
16. Why does Hook have so little speech?
17. The military court concludes “It was a confused situation.” Was it? Who/what confused it?
18. Is there any optimism in this work?
19. Why the allusion to David Bowie?
20. How is our response to Hook’s incompetent commander inflected by our sense of his vulpine superior?
21. Why is there no priest in the film?
22. Compare the three boys. Compare the two daughters.

Discuss the significance of these quotes:

1. “I’m not going out of the country. So you should feel good about that.”
2. “How was college?”
3. To commanding officers you’re “just a piece of meat.”
4. “Rich cunts telling stupid cunts to shoot the poor cunts.”
5. “You don’t know? I’ve fuckin heard it all now.”
6. “It’s all under control.”
7. “The army looks after its own.”

Postscript: Unrelated to the film, if you’re curious about Belfast’s condition today check Patrick Keefe’s “Where the Bodies are Buried,” New Yorker, March 16/15, pp. 42-61. 

Why is that “unrelated to the film”?