Titanic Town

IF YOU can physically bring yourself (kicking and screaming, no doubt) into the cinema - something of an uphill task, given the presence of Julie Walters - here you will be handsomely rewarded with a compact and highly entertaining little drama, which actually manages to address the Northern situation while remaining funny throughout - no mean feat that.

It stars Walters as a harassed, valium-gobbling Andersonstown mother who becomes something of a *peace* campaigner and in the process incurs the irritation of the Republican movement, at some cost to her family. While any quick potted synopsis of Titanic Town - *Peace-loving mother takes on evil IRA gunmen* - would make it sound like a vile and vomitous work of crass political ignorance, the delight of the film is its refusal to succumb to any of the stereotypes. The film's firmly pacifist conviction is all the more impressive because its depiction of life as it's lived in West Belfast (and nationalist NI generally) is so accurate, and not beholden at all to any of the RUC-worshipping, black-becomes-white propaganda that certain other media have been trying to bombard us with for almost a decade now.

Walters is an absolute revelation, in the sense that not only does she not drive you round the bend, she absolutely makes the role her own and achieves an extremely convincing Belfast accent. The events that unfold are predictable enough, but the bright and breezy tone of the script, with its several flashes of caustic gallows humour, seems curiously apposite in the tragic context of the surroundings - it never loses sight of Rule One, which is to keep on laughing since there's never a shortage of reasons to cry. It isn't exactly the best political film ever made in these islands (Channel 4's stunningly illuminating documentary The Committee, now available and thoroughly updated in book form, if you bypass the shelves and ask the assistant very nicely, takes that honour by a mile) but its blend of hyper-realism and light-heartedness makes for a fairly winning mixture.

If you only want to endure one movie about the North all year, I suggest this is as good a bet as any.