Film February #25 – In Bruges

UK/USA 2008

Martin McDonagh’s violent black comedy In Bruges is a film that comes at you out of nowhere; a blast of profanity, depravity, violence and (at the same time) human emotion and playfulness. It manages to take most of your pre-conceptions about genres and values (about humdrum Brit gangster flicks, the value of Colin Farrell’s career, the use of gratuitous euro-locales) and boot them 100 yards into touch. Dependent on your sensibilities, it’s a wildly amusing and impressive film.

The heroes of In Bruges are a pair of Dublin hitmen, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). Ken is an aging, shambling, heavyset, phlegmatic fellow, kind and friendly on the surface. Ray on the other hand, is young, virile, violent and breathtakingly uncouth, possessed of a belligerent incuriosity and contempt. When an honour killing on a child-abusing priest goes horribly wrong, their offscreen (and audibly deranged) boss, the London crime lord Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes), packs them off to the offbeat environs of medieval Bruges to lie low for a fortnight.

They mooch around Bruges’ historic sights, Ken’s touristic enthusiasm rousing nothing more than an X-rated shrug from his colleague. The script’s sardonic flourishes between the double act are very funny. This incongruity seems to be the main joke at first, but McDonagh gradually reveals and blends Ray’s torment into the gloomy but gorgeous setting, well realised by Eigil Bryld’s photography and adorned by Carter Burwell’s slender but elegiac score.

We learn that it was Ray who botched the killing and the consequences hang heavy upon him. Weighed down by guilt and depression, it dawns on him that this weird city, which he detests, is in fact his purgatory. Farrell is revelatory, a coiled spring of physical and comic presence as Ray careers through Bruges. By day bored rigid with the sightseeing, at night Ray persuades Ken to go out for a drink, and gatecrashes a film set with childish abandon. He falls for the beautiful but dodgy Chloe (Clemence Poesy) and becomes perversely amused by Jimmy, the film-within-a-film’s obnoxious dwarf star. McDonagh’s script takes what appears at first to be a crime caper more and more into off-kilter territory, as the perverse plot and character elements flow along within the film’s world towards an ending bleakly dark and hilariously ironic.

Gleeson is superb too as Ken, a man relishing a break from the moral bankruptcy that his profession requires. Genial but deadly serious, and sorrowful at being in the autumn of life, Ken chooses to act as a father figure to save his younger partner. While Ray takes Chloe out to dinner, Ken stays behind in their cramped hotel room to deal with the baleful Harry’s irate messages, learning the real reason for their presence in Bruges. Ken’s ultimate (and noble) response then brings Harry into the fray to deal with the situation in the final quarter of the film; a droll and memorable performance from Fiennes as the mad but weirdly honourable Harry. In Bruges is a heady mix of gratuitous artifice and human drama that may be too bizarre and brutal for some, but in its perverting of convention it is, strangely enough, a breath of fresh air.