Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In Bruges
2008 · Martin McDonagh · In Bruges on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small the two men look in the squares. (camera)
Eigil Bryld shoots wide on anamorphic 35mm and sets Ray and Ken against centuries of stone. The Markt and the Belfry take most of the frame. The two of them keep getting swallowed.
Payoff: The city has not made room for them, and the compositions say so long before anyone complains about it.
Look at the Belfry tower and who wants to climb it. (staging)
The tower appears early and keeps returning. Ken wants to go up and see the view. Ray refuses. The film keeps measuring people by where they are standing on those stairs.
Payoff: The tower is a vertical scale, and how high a character stands tracks how close he is to being judged. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the Belfry a symbol: one object that condenses the film's organizing idea into a shape you can see.
Listen to the bells and the echo in empty squares. (sound)
The town is out of season, so the ambience is church bells, footsteps and flat stone echo. Carter Burwell's score is piano and strings, elegiac and spare. The killings get no music at all.
Payoff: The silence around the violence makes it procedural rather than exciting, which is the film's position on the job.
Watch Farrell switch from joking to something else, fast. (performance)
Ray sulks like a teenager, insults the town, chases a girl, and then his face goes somewhere private. Farrell plays both without letting either one cancel the other out.
Payoff: The comedy and the grief are the same performance. You cannot take one of them and leave the other.
Notice the muted greens and grays against warm brick. (light)
The grade is autumnal and desaturated, relieved by gold lamplight and red-brick facades. Low season, low sun. The city is beautiful and the picture never quite lets it be cheerful.
Payoff: The beauty is real and unavailable to the man looking at it, which is exactly Ray's problem.
Once you have seen it
Look at the men reflected in the canal water. (camera)
Bryld keeps putting the characters into reflective surfaces along the canals, so each of them appears twice inside one frame. The doubling runs quietly through the whole film.
Payoff: A film about conscience keeps showing you a man and his double in one image, and never separates them. In the reading: hyalosign. The reading calls this a crystal: a man and his mirror double held so close that you cannot say which is the original.
Watch the film shoot Ray wanders into. (setting)
A dwarf actor, a drug haze, a tableau out of Hieronymus Bosch. The texture goes briefly unreal inside a film that is otherwise plain and literal, and nobody's memory accounts for it.
Payoff: It rhymes with the Last Judgment paintings Ken keeps looking at. The afterlife is on the wall in this town. In the reading: onirosign. The reading calls this an onirosign: a dream-image belonging to no character, the film's own unconscious leaking through.
Count the seconds a shot holds after a punchline. (cutting)
McDonagh came from the stage and the editing keeps that rhythm. Conversations run to their ends. The camera stays on the face after the joke lands, and the laugh has to sit there.
Payoff: The delay is where the comedy turns. A line is funny, and then, held a beat longer, it is not.
Track how much of the film is waiting for a call. (structure)
The plot is two men with nothing to do until Harry telephones. Fiennes stays off screen until the moral stakes are set. McDonagh spends the middle on sightseeing and argument.
Payoff: A genre built to deliver action hands you stillness instead, and the jokes are what buy that stillness.
Carry this in: Two hitmen with nothing to do but look at a town. Watch what the looking does to them.