Purgatory In Bruges

1,882 words

Here may indeed be torment, but not death.
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio

Perhaps that’s what hell is. The entire rest of eternity spent in Bruges.
Ray, In Bruges

***

I haven’t been to the cinema in 15 years. I don’t even know if they have them here in Costa Rica. I’ve certainly never seen one. The last time I went regularly to what the English used to call “the flicks” was in the city of my birth, London, in 2012. At the time, I lived walking distance from Leicester Square, London’s cinematic Mecca, and that summer I would stroll along the Thames Embankment every Sunday evening and watch whatever the latest big release was. I watched about a dozen before I gave it up as a bad job, and all the films I saw had two distinct qualities in common.

1. They all came out of Hollywood studios.
2. They were all shit.

Actually, I quite liked Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but that was (I suspect) only because I felt smug about getting all the cultural references. The rest was stuff like Killing Me Softly, starring Brad Pitt (of whom more later). But I love movies, and their evolving history, so even though I can’t see new releases now (I certainly can’t afford Netflix), I try to keep up with what is coming out of Hollywood, whose Jewish puppet-masters are endlessly working out new ways to make propaganda look like something you would like to accompany with popcorn, as well as paying them for the privilege of being indoctrinated. Also, whatever happened to great big-screen acting?

I recently watched a collection of trailers for the big new movies of 2025. The first three were franchises: Twenty-Eight Years Later. Fantastic 4. Mission: Impossible. Even the trailers made my eyes hurt. These are not movies, they are orgies of CGI, special-effects porn. None of the rest of the trailers made me think, oh, I must watch that. What exactly happened to the simple concept of the great movie? You know, razor-sharp script, mesmeric acting, a new twist on an old idea, all that stuff? There have not been many inspiring movies made this century, this millennium, but one which bucks the trend is the 2008 film In Bruges.

Colin Farrell plays Ray, an Irish hitman who has botched a job at home and is sent to lie low in the Belgian city of Bruges until it all blows over. Ray is accompanied on this jaunt by a mentor, Ken, an elder representative of the pair’s murderous profession, and played by the craggy Irish actor, Brendan Gleeson. Their gang boss, Harry, is one of the best performances Ralph Fiennes has ever given, despite being confined to the last quarter of the movie.

A strong cast can save a duff script or a terrible movie, although that is not necessary here. By the same token, a poor cast will not necessarily sabotage a good script. In Bruges is a weird buddy movie, and it’s possible to have a good, weird buddy movie even with lacklustre actors. Look at Fight Club, a brilliantly conceived, fabulously scripted movie which could have been ruined by two of the most over-rated actors ever to con their way into Hollywood, Pitt and Edward Norton. If the film were not so strong as a scripted piece of work, and under such masterful direction, those two could have ruined Fight Club. They both act like they were teaching assistants who were suddenly yanked out of the classroom and ordered to turn up on set ASAP because the real actors had quit. Helena Bonham-Carter acts them both off the screen. With In Bruges, you get a near-perfect, dysfunctional buddy movie directed to a tee and shot in one of the most beautiful towns in Europe, plus you get three British actors at the top of their respective games.

Back in Bruges, Ken and Ray await instructions from Harry and, when they arrive, they are for Ken. Kill Ray. This sets up the moral arc of the movie, as the older man has befriended the younger. Will Ken kill his new friend or let him go? He certainly gets a gun for the job, visiting the strange Yuri, Harry’s armorer in Belgium. This scene, and a later one in which Harry requires a gun from the same man, provide more of the movie’s off-kilter humor. When Harry – a clearly psychotic human being – is shown a range of guns and spots an Uzi, he calmly explains to Yuri that he is “not from South Central Los f***ing Angeles. I didn’t come here to shoot 20 black 10-year-olds in a f***ing drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person”. Harry is far from that.

Ray, meanwhile, has been let off the leash by Ken and heads into town, where he seems to attract trouble wherever he happens to be. In a restaurant with a girl he has fallen for, he is involved in an altercation with a man who he takes to be American (but is, it transpires later, Canadian), and knocks him out. Looking down at the supine man, he says, “That’s for John Lennon, you Yankee f***ing c***.” He then goes back to the girl’s apartment where they are interrupted in their dalliance by the arrival of her boyfriend. In the ensuing fight, Ray disarms the boy and fires a blank into his eye, blinding him. He only went out for a quiet evening in Bruges, but carnage ensues. Farrell is a superb facial actor, with eyebrows that go up and down like Tower Bridge and a way of smiling to himself that makes his inner thoughts outer.

If outtakes are available for a movie, it is always instructive to see what got “left on the cutting-room floor”. A flashback scene in which a young Harry (played by the 11th Dr. Who, Matt Smith) walks into a police station and beheads an officer with a sword did not make the final cut, and that was wise. It would have been the only special effect in the movie, and it would have jarred. On the other hand, a 20-second scene featuring Harry on the train to Bruges really should have been left in as it gives the man’s character in one sentence. Sitting opposite a fellow traveler on the train, Harry is asked a pleasant, introductory question intended to strike up conversation. Harry looks coldly at the man and replies: “If I’d wanted to start a conversation with a c***, I would have gone to the ‘start a conversation with a c***’ shop”.

There is scarcely a scene in the film that does not feature high-octane bad language, and watching it again reminded me of something I have long known: the Irish really do swear a lot. The French have about two swear words, the Irish a whole lexicon, most of which come into play here, and yet so and yet somehow without seeming egregious.

One actor who does steal a couple of scenes from Gleason and Farrell is a dwarf, Jordan Prentice. Dwarf actors have been in the news recently not because of performances they have given, but performances they were not allowed to give. When a live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was announced, height-restricted thespians must have though their moment had arrived. Then the studio used CGI instead, which is ruining cinema. They probably couldn’t find enough diverse dwarves. Prentice is great. He plays Jimmy, an actor who is in Bruges to star as a schoolboy in what he describes to Ken as “a jumped-up, Eurotrash piece of rip-off f***ing bullshit”. Ken replies, “In a bad way?” After the two have met, Ray sees Jimmy walking across a square and waves at him with no response. “Why didn’t you wave to me yesterday?” Ray demands. Jimmy replies that “I was on a really strong horse tranquilizer. I wasn’t waving to anyone. Except maybe a horse”.

Jimmy is also present for the scene’s best line, which goes to Gleeson. At a cocaine-fueled soirée involving Ken, Ray, Jimmy and two hookers, and after Jimmy’s lecture on a coming race war, Ken has had enough. His parting shot to the assembled party is typical of the low-key humor which keeps this tragi-comedy from being all tragedy; “Two manky prostitutes and a racist dwarf. I’m heading home.”

For a hitman movie co-starring a dwarf, and full of drugs, guns, and bad language, In Bruges has a surprisingly strong religious theme. Ray’s botched hit takes place in a church, also the first building the pair visit in Bruges. On arrival at their hotel, they are told that their booking for two rooms is now one double room, the hotel being booked out for Christmas. Not enough room at the inn. Religious imagery abounds as the two hitmen visit a shrine supposedly containing the blood of Christ. All this sits heavily with Ray, who accidentally killed a little boy during his bungled hit in Dublin.

Equally obvious religious aspects of In Bruges are the themes of redemption and purgatory. Hovering between life and death, Ray’s destiny is not his own, and when Ken puts him on a train and lets him run, he doesn’t know if Ray will live or kill himself. Guilt and atonement are difficult enough for the rest of us, but when you are a hitman it presumably complicates matters somewhat. Harry is not best pleased with Ken’s decision to let the boy go, and makes his own way to Bruges for revenge on his childhood friend – or at least accomplice gangster – Ken. Before the well-constructed pay-off scene, when Harry demands to know why Ken didn’t kill Ray as instructed, Ken tells him that “the boy has the capacity to change”. Harry is incensed.

“Ken? When I phoned you, did I say, Ken, would you mind being Ray’s psychiatrist? No. I told you to blow his f***ing head off”. A retribution scene at the top of a church tower is both very funny and agonizing to watch.

The town of Bruges is another star of the movie. I visited Bruges on the strength of this film alone, and I suspect a fair percentage of its tourist trade have seen In Bruges. “It’s like a fairy-tale”, says Ken, and he is right. Bruges at night is every bit as gorgeously sinister as it looks in the movie. These are the remnants of the past one fears for given the current migrant invasion of Europe. What will happen when they get to Florence?

Watching In Bruges again made me rather maudlin about Western cinema. At what point, exactly, did it go from being one of the greatest artistic media in history to being a bully-pulpit for terrible ideologies? Cinema should enchant, not lecture. But I suppose we will always have cinema that has already been made, so screw Hollywood. Let it sink into the sea and take its financiers and moguls with it, and let real films get made again. You know, films that entertain rather than scold and lecture.

I can’t recommend In Bruges highly enough. The trailer is here, the movie itself here (although the volume is very low). Farrell, Gleeson, and Fiennes, the enchanting town of Bruges, two manky prostitutes and a racist dwarf. What more do you want?