There is plenty to ponder during this excellent documentary on post-Troubles life in the largely republican New Lodge district of Belfast, but, among all the trauma, the most telling moment is perhaps a harmless exchange, carried on as Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin is loaded on to an aircraft, between the charming Jolene and two older neighbours.
Nonchalantly puzzled as to her status, she wonders if they are “half-Irish and “half-British”. Her friend explains: “We’re full Irish, but they stole our identity.” When God Save the King (as I suppose it already was by then) comes on, one neighbour turns his back while the other puts her hands over her ears. “It’s only a bit of music,” says Jolene, puzzled. For many of her generation these symbols matter less than they once did.
Most of Alessandra Celesia’s film focuses on a man who, raised among the worst of the atrocities, understandably finds it harder to set aside the old unhappiness. Joe McNally, an intense middle-aged man who has served time as an “ordinary decent criminal”, remembers the murder of his uncle, then just a teenager, by the Shankill Butchers.
McNally has never been able to shake the image of a plaster on the corpse’s nose – placed to cover up the exit wound from a shot to the back of the head. Now, he rails against the drug dealers who moved in when the paramilitaries went elsewhere. It’s now nearly as bad as Dublin, argues McNally.
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The Flats: Excellent post-Troubles documentary that illuminates how trauma can nag away for decades
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In her treatment of McNally, Celesia offers a moving, rigorous character study of how trauma can nag away for decades. The desperation with which he hangs on to a famous phrase by Bobby Sands ultimately becomes a little unnerving. “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” he repeats in the manner of a fraught mantra.
The Flats keeps most of its focus tight on the subjects, but allows the occasional tasteful re-enactment. You could, at a stretch, see parallels here with Joshua Oppenheimer’s approach in The Act of Killing, but here Celesia is in complete sympathy with her subjects.
It is not all gloom. Jolene, a fine singer with a good line in Ulster wit, gestures to a happier and less fraught future. Her Irish passport will, she clarifies, allow her to skip the queues at the airport. So there is that.
In cinemas from May 23rd
