The Chronicle Herald Review / 29.02.08

Source: The Chronicle Herald

In Bruges a world apart

IN BRUGES IS remarkable. It’s a comedy, a thriller, a satire, and a human drama, and it’s all set in one of Europe’s favourite holiday postcard places, the picturesque me­dieval city of Bruges in Belgium.

Martin McDonagh’s script is as good as film writing gets. His choice of sets and sequences, his instinct for telling action, action that is simple and signif­icant, is always right. He moves this singular, strange comedy along with classic pacing, a comedy that is also a tragedy with in implacable destiny in store for the principal characters.

Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Bren­dan Gleeson) are professional hit men on the lam. They have been sent from England to hide out in Bruges by Har­ry (Ralph Fiennes) after Ray has killed a priest. Harry is an obsessively vio­lent man who lives a quiet life assign­ing hits and setting up safe houses.

Although there is no Irish Repub­lican Army in this story, Harry acts with the same kind of absolute and ruthless authority as an IRA comman­dant, and his boys, Ray and Ken, follow the same code.

Friendships are dangerous in such a culture. But Ken, the older of the two, grows fond of the younger Ray. We do too and that makes the exciting thriller of an ending all the more wrenching for us. Talk about sympathy for the devil.

Everything in the movie is foretold in the short scene near the beginning in which Ray carries out his hit on the priest. I can’t tell you anything more about it, because I don’t want to de­prive you of the impact of this scene.

But I can tell you it forecasts the surreal, later echoed in Bruges, where a movie is being shot with a Hiero­nymus Bosch theme. (Bosch was a 15th century Dutch painter who depicted hell in scenes of surreal horror as a warning to the sinful to change their ways.) It’s funny, as is much of the movie. But it’s also horrific.

The scene displays the realistic vio­lence of guns and blood, pain and dis­illusion which will lead to superhu­man efforts to survive and surprising levels of compassion for suffering.

Farrell as the hotheaded Irishman Ray, is a straight shooter in more ways than one. Gleeson is older and more aware of the ironic levels of the pain of victims and villains both.

Fiennes recalls his performance in Schindler’s List as the crazed concen­tration camp commandant, and anoth­er Harry Potter alumna, Clemence Poesy, (Fleur Delacour) plays the Bel­gian girl Chloe with whom Ray falls in love.

Jordan Prentice as the dwarf Jimmy, is a film actor with an extremist mind­set, and the most effective of many subliminal references to the works of Bosch.

The energy and pace of In Bruges make it a cliffhanger and a classic, comparable to Fellini’s baroque mas­terpieces, but with an element of the Bourne trilogy in its handling of the manhunt, which gives us a climactic ending that is both inevitable and surprising.