I had been wanting to see In Bruges for quite a while, but you know how it goes with some movies: they’re always the third on your priority list, and never seem to get up to the first place. So when you finally get it, a lot of time may have passed. This time, though, seeing how the store was empty and had no copies of “Aanrijding in Moskou” (which seems to be doing a better job in Germany than in Belgium) left, it was finally time for “In Bruges”.

It’s in Belgium

As I expected, this movie is filled to the brim with insults towards Belgium. These are just like the ones we used to see in Monty Python: silly mockeries that make little to no sense – a fact acknowledged by the writers themselves. I guess it’s the fact that it’s a small place with no identity (even after the government crisis and the whole molesting children thing) – like a rural town. A rural town much like Bruges. So that means: you’ve got a rural town inside a rural town. Are there any larger shitholes left than Bruges? Not for the British.

The movie had a lot more than just touristic antitourism though. It had brilliant acting too: it was wonderful to see Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes (of Voldemort fame) perform such lovable assholes. The moment where Harry (Fiennes’s character) apologizes to his wife for calling his children “fucking cunt kids” is a good example of this, as is the chat he has with Ken (Gleeson) whilst drinking a beer. You love to hate them. They’re cuddly motherfuckers.

Maybe that’s what hell is

What really struck me though, was the solidness of the script. I was expecting a lot of swearing, a lot of anti-belgianism and loads of black humour, but I got so much more: the movie slowly but certainly delved into this “night of the living dead” kind of feeling: Bruges is a place where you go to die, sort of the like the river Styx: when you’re inside you’re not quite dead yet, but you’re certainly not alive. Only in Bruges, there’s cocaine. And midgets.

I love it when a movie has a defined style, and sticks with it. You can tell when you look at In Bruges that the director (Martin McDonagh) wrote the script himself and chose to make this movie something of his own. A product he loved and nurtured like a child, if you may. It has this incredible sense of stylistic oneness, this absurdism which sticks by its own set of rules, almost like poetry. This story has not been conceived by ten semi-gifted people sitting around a table shoehorning semi-good ideas into a semi-good script. This story has been written by someone who knew where he was going.

He was going to fucking Belgium.

Favourite Quote:
Ken: Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny. I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a
cunt now, and you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that’s going to change is that you’re going
to be an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my
cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.