The cityscape as the main protagonist

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2011)

As usual, a great script is the basis for this great film. The story turns on a series of highly improbable circumstances (which I won't mention to not spoil the enjoyment), but the script has managed to flesh out the characters sufficiently well that we even come to expect them, or at least regard them as normal in context. The camera work is excellent, with long, static shots of the cityscape, and with zooms reserved mostly for people shots, so we unconsciously accept how Bruges and its Medieval architecture becomes a powerful player in the story, and the protagonists' life and death decisions and actions (this is a crime and morality play, so I can safely reveal that there is a certain level of violence) seem almost arbitrary and meaningless compared to the permanence and therefore emotional force of the constructed landscape against which the action takes place. In fact, the script acknowledges this several times, since the protagonists in several crucial moments actually stop shooting each other to allow themselves to change locales that they think are more appropriate (the tower on the main square is the most importance example, though at least one scene involves Bruges' famous canals). Other normally important actions – there's a great scene with one criminal, a dwarf and two prostitutes in a nondescript hotel room – are interrupted or are inconclusive. It's as if meaningful action can only take place against the backdrop of the city's public places. David Lean's films, especially Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, also tended to transform the environment from simple backdrop into an active protagonist. In Bruges does it in a much more subtle yet strangely effective manner, which is perhaps as it should be since the life and death situations in which the protagonists find themselves are all the result of venal, morally disgusting and illegal activities. The city, unbeknown to them, works its magic (despite that Ray one of the killers on the lam describes it as a "shithole") and brings each of them to their just desserts, hell or redemption, or perhaps both. All in all, an extremely well-crafted film that makes believable the improbable and underscores the futility of individual human action (cities are the symbol of the entire community par excellence). I haven't mentioned the actors, but Colin Farell's excesses for once are used to good effect, and Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleason are excellent as usual, and the excellent and underplayed script allows the secondary actors to shine as well. All in all, a great little movie. Life and Death in L.A. makes sense, in America, but here, life and death have strangely little effect or impact, since the location makes it such that life or death are almost predestined and thus meaningless as individual destinies.