In Bruges? Yes...

True artist's cinema? Irish play-right Martin McDonagh (who wrote cult play 'pillow-man' and got an oscar for his short movie, Six Shooter) directed his first full-length feature film and I loved it.

Tragicomedies can either be extremely good or extremely bad. The issue with them is that it can either work as one genre complimenting the other or one canceling the other. "No man's land", the Bosnian movie that deprived "Amelie" of her oscar, was a perfect example of a tragicomedy, that starts like a comedy, makes you laugh and feel that this will be a light-hearted war parody and then when tragedy strikes, you feel it much more deeply.

"In Bruges" is like that as well. The movie starts with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson goofing around essentially playing a modern version of Laurel and Hardy, complete with the facial expressions and all. They are supposed to be two hitmen sent to hide in Bruges after a deal went slightly wrong. Their boss, Harry, played in a cartoonish but surprisingly non-annoying manner by Ralph Fiennes, is supposed to call them to tell them what to do. They wait and nothing happens, and when Harry calls things are not as good or as simple as they seemed.

The second part of the movie is dark, deep and poignant. And when you're entangled in the story, the story that started so lightly and superficially you think 'how did I get into this mess? Why do I care about these guys that are essentially killers?' But you do and it hurts you, you care what happens to them.

I guess what I want to say is that sadness affects you the most right after you've been happy.
And that's that: that's my wisdom for the day.

Tragedy and laughs

I like Martin McDonagh, i like him a lot. I liked 'in bruges' and i am convinced i am going to like 'the pillowman' when I get round to reading him. In my previous post about 'in bruges' i concentrated in the fact that the movie was a tragicomedy, in the manner of Shakespearian 'tempest' or 'twelfth night'. Such an interesting genre, tragicomedies are, and a very risky one at that. The issue with them, is that the atmosphere they build can be spoilt very easily. In the same way, Almodovar threatened to spoil his dark, sombre, tragic atmosphere, in 'Broken embraces', with his last scene (but didn't), tragicomedies are constantly walking the same thin line.

'The beauty queen on Leenane' runs the same risk: Martin McDonagh's first play, is a deep and profound tragedy of human inadequacy, laced with darkly funny one-liners. The issue is that the fact that this IS a tragedy has to remain clear to the audience throughout, or at least it needs to be prevalent after the tragic storyline starts to unravel. When i read the play, it was clear to me that this was a tragedy and the humour was just there to undermine but ultimately underline the tragedy of it all. When we saw the play on friday however, the audience made up of well-dressed mature women seemed to fall for the comedy rather than the tragedy part of the play. The result? A really uncomfortable two hours where I would hear the audience audibly laughing at every hint of humour, entirely disregarding the drama that was unfolding in front of their eyes. It almost felt as if they were desperate to see only the funny bits of the play, exactly because the dark parts were too dark and too tragic.

Talk about art being poignant...

Two men alone, waiting

Why is the thought of two men sitting by themselves, confined in a real or imaginary prison, waiting for some ill-identified entity to come and give them some kind of direction, so extensively used in modern theatre? Beckett did it in Waiting for Godot, Pinter does in the Dumb Waiter and McDonagh copies him in In Bruges. Perhaps it is the ultimate theological metaphor: people, we are prisoners in our lives, not knowing that there is a world out there. And God is irrational (sending wrong orders down a dumb waiter, according to Pinter) and most of all absent. Don't put your money on him coming to save you or give you any direction whatsoever.

It's up to us folks, only.