Sardonic comedy springs surprises in the midst of a medieval Belgian city. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

THE BELGIAN city of Bruges is not the first place that springs to mind when one thinks of hitmen comedies, so it comes as some surprise that this gorgeous medieval city plays such an integral role in the success of this film. Seasoned playwright Martin McDonagh’s debut feature is a slyly humorous quasi-fable with several layers of moral subtext and a canny eye for the latent tragedy and sadness lurking beneath many comic situations.

Sent to Bruges to await orders from their boss (a pathologically pedantic Ralph Fiennes), inveterate hitman Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and new-to-the-game upstart Ray (a glove-fitting role for Colin Farrell) have little more to do than to kill time... in Bruges. The popular perception of the city as little more than a slumbering Dullsville is highlighted by Ray’s insistence on it being an utter shithole. Not one to be confined inside a hotel room – or marvel at historical minutiae with Ken, for that matter –, he insists on familiarising himself with areas of the city not on the regular tourist trail. It’s not very long, however, before the lightly excursionary narrative gives way to the discovery that Ray is being tormented by the enormity of a past event.

Much of the narrative concerns the conflict between the desirability of dreams and the despair of reality. Ray’s faced with a dilemma: ultimately there’s nothing he can do to shuck the weight of what he’s done; he even ponders whether Bruges might be a state of mind, of purgatory, seeing as no matter how he tries to leave the city, he cannot escape his certain fate. Somehow Bruges embodies an almost religious sense of moral finality; i.e. here is where Ray’s actions will be judged.

The film’s incongruously unorthodox use of setting brings to mind Hot Fuzz; coming to represent a good deal of what In Bruges is about: confounding audience expectations. Instead of providing Fiennes’s boss with the typical lamplit, smoky saferoom from whence to arrange the business of killing, he’s visually introduced (after earlier making his presence known through an expletive-filled telegram and peculiar phonecalls) in his ordinary home office, apoplectically smashing a telephone receiver and screaming at his wife while their kids and the nanny sit benignly in the lounge beside the Christmas tree. Likewise, Bruges’s architecture – once beheld of a dreamy, brochurial elegance – almost imperceptibly transmutes into a shadowy, ghostly presence; the seesawing blurriness largely redolent of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. In fact, much of the film plays out as an homage to Don’t Look Now: the spectre of a dead child hanging over events; the alluring yet foreboding olde-world location (Bruges is billed as the ‘Venice of the North’); and the way in which it repeatedly toggles the boundary between dreams and reality. McDonagh even makes a slyly self-reflexive direct reference to Roeg’s film, with a baffled Ray being told at one point that a camera crew are filming a scene paying homage to Don’t Look Now. The film’s aesthetic also sends up Bruges’s fairytale charm, juxtaposing snowflakes with splatter; canals with creepiness – the idea being that the fantastical possibilities offered up by such a place are in permanent conflict with the (often futile) grind of harsh reality.

Dialogue-wise, comparisons to Pulp Fiction’s forthright talkiness aren’t wide of the mark, but overall the banter has more in common with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – not always a good thing, as occasionally it shares with that film a slightly stagy, over-rehearsed feel. In a film dominated by the whipsmart verbal exchanges of its two leads, a surprising degree of the best chuckles are provided by the unconventional behaviour of the minor characters: the would-be robber partially blinded by a blank from his own gun; the mild-mannered middleman mulling over piddling linguistic distinctions; an indignant, heavily pregnant hotel owner stunting the flow of the climactic chase scenes. Pity then, that at times it feels as if the film is merely trading on its ‘Irishness’ in order to get away with some awfully half-arsed humour. Much of said humour derives from taking potshots at easy targets: midgets (or ‘dwarfs’, as they supposedly prefer to be called) are spared no mercy; bromidic gay jokes are rife; fat American tourists get their comeuppance (yawn); and retarded black girls don’t get off lightly, either. That many of the jibes are delivered from the mouth-before-the-brain Ray doesn’t excuse their teenage jokesmithery, though it undoubtedly provides a release valve for those in need of a good minority mockery. As Dorothy Parker once observed: “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”. Indeed, occasionally it seems as if McDonagh and the cast cracked themselves up over what they could get away with, without so much thought as to how the humour could be fused to secreted insecurities and neuroses. Then again, McDonagh has wit in spades, exemplified by his clever sense to subvert his own jokes – and turn the tables on smugly assumptive audiences – when it’s revealed that the ‘bigoted American diners’ the audience had earlier eye-rolled over turn out to be Canadians. Touche.

Ralph Fiennes does a superb job of sending up the archetypal professional crime boss with delusions of moral dominion, delivering lines straight out of an Eastwood western (“it’s a matter of honour”; “it’s a shoot-out”), and expressing exasperation when the others don’t play along with his script. Gleeson delivers a terrific performance as Ken, all elastic expression and wisened eyes, while Farrell reminds us of why he used to be held in such high regard, threading Ray with a compelling combination of fractious ennui, roguish cheek, impetuous innocence and moral anguish; his nascent romance with a Belgian drug dealer recognisably real in its bittersweetness, though any sense of a silver lining is hampered by the creeping realisation that Ray’s best endeavours will likely be thwarted by his fateful demons. Comparable to The Sopranos in its debunking of glamorous assumptions about the lives of professional criminals, the film invests its two leads with multi-dimensional emotions, all the while grounding them in the everyday. Ergo, we bear witness to small yet significant humanist touches – Ray brushing his teeth before a date; Ken counting out coins before a booth stickler for exact admission.

It never feels as if Ray and Ken are being judged for their choices; McDonagh is far more interested in humanising their situation and leaving their decisions open to audience interpretation, albeit without ever really letting them off the hook. For much of the time it’s easy to forget that they’re hired killers; especially Ray, of whom one cannot help but wonder how he got into such a seamy business in the first place – a thought all-too-clearly playing on Ray’s mind, too. All in all, this is a much more complex film than it initially seems, showing plenty of promise for McDonagh’s filmic future.