In Burgess

“What d’ya reckon ‘In Burgess’ would be like?” In Burgess… I was in the queue at the Sun cinema to go see In Bruges. I looked around to see who it was who was asking the question. I wanted to say “It’s Bruges (pronounced Brooooje) actually” but this isn’t correct either. It’s only pronounced like this in the English speaking world. If you are really “in Bruges”, I think I recall the pronunciation as “Broogger”. It’s a complicated thing. It’s a thing which you can so easily get wrong and something which becomes a marker of who you are and where you’ve been.

Which is sort of what the film is about. The two main characters are trying to lay low in the tourist-filled medieval town of Bruges in Belgium because one of them, Ray, has done something really horrible. They both do horrible things for a living but one character, Ken, is more accustomed to the personal impacts of his chosen career as a hired killer.

We follow Ray and Ken around the medieval churches as Ray tries to come to terms with what he has done. Paintings of medieval views of purgatory and of the last day on earth form the backdrop for both men. Is it possible to find redemption when you have committed an evil act? What’s the place of hell and heaven? What happens if you’re only a little bit bad? The director counter-balances the scenes of medieval Europe with a sort of modern, sometimes comic nastiness. We meet a young drug dealer and her skinhead boyfriend. A guns dealer who works out of a cornucopia of antiques and fine arts. A cocaine sniffing dwarf and his Dutch prostitute. Modern life looks pretty dissolute. There’s a film within a film construct enables the film to include a large number of people dressed in fantasy costumes with animal masks or animal heads; these people appear and reappear at the periphery like a version of a bachannale gone wrong. The only ‘normal’ person we meet is the owner of the hotel where Ray and Kenny stay. She provides a kind of moral pivot for the range of strange activities around her.

And in a funny way, the two bad men do as well. The film explores notions of honour, integrity and loyalty through the two main characters and supporting actor Ralph Fiennes. The difficult choices made by all three characters stem from the strict moral codes which they were born into. It feels strange using the term “moral codes” to describe their thinking but all three have clear ideas about good and evil and about how you treat people which are as much a moral code as mine and maybe not too far away; it’s just that I am not in the habit of killing people. So it’s sort of interesting to position this type of Sopranos thinking in Bruges, with its facade of medieval trappings.

It’s not a great film but not a terrible one either. There is some great, laugh out loud comic dialogue. The shoot-out scenes need work. One reviewer called it “Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks”. He’s right. The film doesn't quite work because Bruges is not a place of brooding medieval nastiness but a more sterile and tidy tourist town. It needed to be set in a slightly edgier place, maby St Petersburg; a place which combines tourism and a dark Russian underbelly(by all accounts, I haven't been there).

But I liked being back in Bruges. I spent some time in Bruges about 15 years ago. I remembered chocolate shops, extreme tidiness and fruit-flavoured beer. It was a tourist construct; full of shops for the well-heeled and opportunities for culture. I hadn’t remembered any of the churches and so, when I re-read my dairy of the trip last night, I wasn’t surprised to see the phrase “I am sick of churches”. I bet we didn’t go into any of them. We did go into a tower where a lot of the film action takes place; I have written “We climbed lots of stairs because there is supposed to be a great view but the 70-odd people in front of us at the top made it difficult to appreciate.” We went on two excellent tours; one on bikes around the city and out into the countryside and a whole day bus tour to explore World War 1 battle sites which was a highlight of our time in Europe. We stayed in a smelly youth hostel outside of the beautiful old town and bought expensive but divine chocolates. We felt like outsiders because all of the old city felt like a construct. And because it was expensive. Just as the two hit men feel like outsiders. But not my friend in cinema queue who doesn't know what she doesn't know and therefore doesn't know about her outsiderness (if that's a word).

In Bruges, we rested. We had not quite enough money to really enjoy everything. We learnt how to pronounce Bruges…But we might have been in Burgess…