In Bruges (2008)

 Romanian version here. I was aked to to piece for the TIFF 25 retrospective in AperiTIFF and here it is. 

"They're Filming Midgets..."

Heaven, hell or purgatory? It's Bruges!

An extraordinary debut by Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopats, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri), In Bruges is one of the very best films of 2008—and much more than that. A cult film par excellence, it becomes more valuable every time I revisit it. I am still astonished that, after premiering at Sundance, it failed to win any major awards there. It did go on to win Colin Farrell a Golden Globe and earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a category it won at the BAFTAs.

I like to think, however, that it did for tourism in Bruges what Roman Holiday did for Rome!

I, for one, spent a day there in 2014, and my impressions matched Ray's point of view exactly, as opposed to Ken's.

The Colin Farrell/Ray – Brendan Gleeson/Ken pairing is fabulous, and McDonagh reunited them fourteen years later in another extraordinary film, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

And Ralph Fiennes as Harry is impeccable, ferocious—an irresistible character.

You can tell that McDonagh is also a playwright, and that his literary influences stem from the Theatre of the Absurd, yet the film remains intensely cinematic.

First and foremost, it owes a great deal to Harold Pinter's 1959 play The Dumb Waiter. In turn, Pinter's play was inspired by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Add a touch of British gangster cinema—Irish, in this case—a hint of Bruegel landscapes in Bruges, nihilism, a fatal trauma, an improbable love story, and black, absurd humour turned up to eleven.

Other clues: Touch of Evil, Don't Look Now, Carlito's Way, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Carter Burwell's score most likely came into McDonagh's world via the Coen Brothers (see Fargo in the same TIFF retrospective of black comedies), with whom McDonagh began a wonderful collaboration that continued throughout all of his subsequent films.

Like Fargo, In Bruges was never released theatrically in Romania at the time.

Alin Ludu Dumbravă