Bloody Sunday

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * *)

Paul Greengrass' film about the events of January 30, 1972 in Londonderry, burns with a phosphorescent rage. The style recalls most recently the brilliant television drama Hillsborough, about the Liverpool football ground disaster in 1989, but its antecedents reach further back, to Peter Watkins' The War Game and Gillo Pontecorvo's still-spellbinding The Battle of Algiers which Greengrass has specifically cited as an influence.

Yet Bloody Sunday has a compelling energy all of its own as it anatomises the massacre that ensued when British troops opened fire on unarmed pro-IRA demonstrators in the troubled Northern Ireland town, killing 14 and wounding dozens more.

Much of the film's power hangs on the performances of the two protagonists in whom Greengrass, who also wrote, has located the conflict. Nesbitt plays Ivan Cooper a (Protestant) MP whose constituency is overwhelmingly Catholic and who has called a civil rights march to protest against civil rights abuses and the anti-Catholic bias in the electoral and penal systems; meanwhile the British Army's commanding officer, Major General Ford (a brilliantly, coolly patrician Pigott-Smith) has banned marches because of "the adverse security situation" in the province.

"If we don't march, civil rights are dead in this city," Cooper tells his followers, repeating his determination that the protest will be peaceful.

There's not a dispassionate moment in Bloody Sunday but it's not an unbalanced or even tendentious piece of polemic. Greengrass is remarkably even-handed, depicting the tragedy as an always-inevitable collision of complicated factors. His wobbly hand-held cameras (and Clare Douglas' sublime editing) take us deep into each camp and create a sense of immediacy and urgency, abetted by fabulously naturalistic delivery of dialogue, which make it almost impossible to believe that this is not straight documentary.

The film, which shared best film honours at the Berlin Film Festival, whipped up controversy in Britain when it was released on the eve of a new official inquiry into the events but it vigorously asserts its right to be read on its own terms; it expects nothing from and owes nothing to official process.

Cast: James Nesbitt, Tim Pigott-Smith, Nicholas Farrell, Gerard McSorley, Kathy Kiera Clarke

Director: Paul Greengrass.
Running time: 110 mins

Rating: R13 (violence, content may disturb)

Screening: Rialto from Thursday