We enjoyed In Bruges for its black humor, its witty profanity, and the unpredictability of its plot (that is, until the mandatory chase scene). And especially for the lovely views of medieval Bruges, an old Hanseatic town.
In Bruges contains a film-within-a-film which is described by Chloe, the handsome drug dealer and thief, as an imitation or a homage or a ‘nod of the head’ toward Don’t Look Now, Nicholas Roeg’s scary-as-hell Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland masterpiece. I’ve been racking my poor brains, trying to decide whether there’s a meaningful connection between the two films — or whether the writer-director Martin McDonagh is just planting red herrings.
Bruges and Venice (where the earlier film is set) are old, architecturally rich, becanalled towns and both directors make much of their warm civic atmosphere. The plots of both films are initiated by the deaths of young children. In each film, an important character is a dwarf who is, one case, the perpetrator of violence and in the other its victim. That’s all that I can come up with at the moment, so I’m leaning to the red-herring theory. But I’d be interested in other people’s views.
Leave a Reply