Image courtesy of Focus Features
“It’s a pastiche of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now…Not a pastiche, but…homage is too strong… A nod of the head.”
Some films can be pretty transparent about what they’re trying to say. In Bruges (2008) does so in an early scene between protagonist Ray (Colin Farrell), who has just snuck into a movie set, and Chloe (Clémence Poésy), a production assistant. Ray asked why they were filming dwarfs, and Chloe tries to explain with the above description.
This Oscar-nominated film, directed by Martin McDonagh,is just that: a bit of pastiche, homage, and a nod of the head to many different films, artists, and art movements. The layered story follows Ray and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) over the course of a few days in Bruges, Belgium, where they’ve gone to hideout after a hit job creates collateral damage. In the fifteen years since the film’s release, the only thing has hasn’t aged like a barrel-aged, Belgian beer are some jokes about ‘retarded’ people and ‘poofs’.
Director McDonagh uses this film as homage to Don’t Look Now by setting the film in Bruges, known as the ‘Venice of the North’. Roeg’s horror film has Donald Sutherland running through the alleys and canals of Venice, being haunted by a ghostly little girl that looks like his deceased daughter. Bruges borrows a few plot points from that movie, including a chase through the canals and grieving over a deceased child.
Ray and Ken’s dialogue makes the movie shine, with Ken appreciating the art, architecture, and culture of the city, while Ray, an entertainingly unstable man child, scoffs, complains, and runs off at the sight of a movie production with dwarfs. There he meets love interest Chloe and dwarf Jimmy, whom he tries to befriend and ask about suicide rates for dwarves. Plenty more pitch black humor help to balance the dour tone, pessimism, and suffering.
Bruges becomes a thematic pastiche of the city and it’s Northern European Renaissance painters, known for their depictions of pessimism and suffering. Ray and Ken explore some famous art galleries where three artists’ work are featured: Jan Provost’s Death and the Miser, Gerard David’s The Judgment of Cambyses, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment.
Bosch’s work becomes a propellant for Ray and Kent’s conversations about the afterlife, hell, and, of course, purgatory. Ray, while staring at The Last Judgment, thinks aloud, “Maybe that’s what Purgatory is: having to spend eternity in fuckin’ Bruges.” The painter’s work also is an aspect of the art direction for the film that both Chloe and Jimmy are working on. Various scenes in Bruges involve Ray, Chloe, or Jimmy surrounded by actors in costumes or masks from people or creatures in Bosch’s work. Jimmy even calls the fake film within a film a ‘Bosch-iannightmare’.
All of the characters become further entangled when Ray and Kent’s boss Harry (an unhinged Ralph Fiennes) comes to Bruges to settle things. Harry and other characters become nods of the head to other various religious figures as the film builds to brutally violent climax. Brief glimpses of some graphic makeup effects become even more nods to specific people in the featured paintings from earlier in the film.
All the themes and characters converge in the climax that takes a turn for the meta. And there, all the beauty, horror, and themes of the film, and life itself, swirl together like the snow that’s falling on the picturesque city.
- EB