21.11.1996

British myth

John Craig reviews Nothing personal, directed by Thaddeus 0’Sullivan

This film breaks some new ground, in the sense that the loyalist paramilitaries in the Six Counties have never previously been at the centre of a film. The phenomenon has been examined before in another film, No surrender, back in the 1980s, but that was set in Liverpool and examined the impact of religious sectarianism spilling over from Ireland into England.

Nothing personal examines a small subsection of paramilitaries back in 1975, during a fitful attempt to operate a ceasefire in Belfast. The film opens with an IRA bomb explosion in a crowded pub, followed by the loyalists seeking out catholic victims, more or less at random.

Nothing personal has two strengths. The first is atmosphere. The song crooned by a middle-aged chanteuse about Billy McFadzean, an Ulster Volunteer Force member killed fighting for ‘king and country’ on the Somme in 1916, was a brilliant stroke. The normal repertoire of loyalist songs about keeping down papist idolaters would have been out of place: the film needed a sentimental ballad - how these people see themselves.

The second is good acting. James Frain plays a local loyalist commander and manages to convey the character’s ruthlessness but also his vestiges of critical thinking and remorse.

Ian Hart, who played the main character in Land and freedom, here is a psychotic gunman, a loose cannon who approximates to the ‘men of violence’ tag so beloved of the British establishment in the 1980s.

However, the plot is artificial. It has a ‘catholic boy meets protestant girl’ element which is unconvincing and contrived.

The key failing, as usual, is a political one. The loyalists and the IRA are portrayed as being absolutely symmetrical to each other, like wings on a bird. This is clear in one scene where the rival groups meet to talk about a truce. Each side fills exactly one half of the screen - the director is equating them.

The role the British state plays is overlooked - the army and police hardly figure until the very end, when the loyalist commander exploits the tacit alliance with the squaddies to have them assassinate his own reprobate gunmen.

Despite its strengths of atmosphere and acting, this film perpetuates the self-serving British myth of violent, sectarian Irishmen doing each other in.

John Craig