In Bruges (2008)

The value of sacrifice is love?

In Bruges (2008) does not really appear to be a love story, in the traditional sense. What is a love story, but a story of change?

That it is between two men, that they are killers, cold and calculating, does not matter in the sense that love is not necessarily the embroiled physicality that is so often a pastiche in the style of a tragedy-less Romeo & Juliet.

Unraveling slowly: the relationship of this movie is constructed, it has a foundation. If anything death serves as an incalculable metaphor: as the plunge from the heights of the structural relationship to the feet of the other.

The theme of the turn, of the transformation that hinges on a crucial relationship, or encounter; it is a sudden moment of…clarity, or conscience? There is to the Idiot always the possibility of redemption, but it falls on the flip of a coin, the turn of a lip, regardless. Embedded in the structure of transformation is the necessity of the flow of karma that whirls in eddies as direction is changed. To turn to face karma, to truly transform, is to face retribution. And if you are a killer, the answer is easily found.

At the shore of past/future, the present emerges as a viciously winding staircase. In the end can you see that there is no self?

The turn between, accident and intent, is like a line drawn in the sand. Movements of repetition solve only to serve the interests of the invisible.

I have, so far, ignored the dark laugh—black comedy, irony, satire—that sets the film in motion; it is this element that functions both as cause and as effect, that brings out the beauty of the sacrifice. It is almost too bizarre to be beautiful or too sad to be funny, and yet there is for this exact purpose not quite any concrete rationality present. By refusing truth/reality altogether it gets along with the shadow alone, mimetic recognition, the partial and fragmented anything. This is the beauty of being In Bruges.

Beauty is a crush of gravity and a death rattle. Time sentences here, but to serve out the arbitrary rules happily is…it is truly play.

Pooh Bear, your block is the only way.