Park City Dispatch. 1.

Sundance always seems to open with a British film. When the festival's programmer John Cooper was asked why that was on the NPR affiliate KPCW's morning show yesterday, he shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

This year it was In Bruges, a first feature by Martin McDonagh, the much-awarded British playwright of Irish origin who had a string of hits and successes with The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman, and who won the 2004 short film Oscar for Six Shooter, which featured Brendan Gleeson as a man who learns of the death of his wife and then encounters a violent teenager on a train.

Setting a film like that on a train is a logistical nightmare. Filming in Bruges is something else, since concerns about historical preservation in a medieval town tend to make anything that moves difficult to shoot, hence the whimsical absurdity of the premise of McDonagh's story - that two hit men would bolt from London after accidentally killing a child while aiming for a priest, and take refuge in beautiful Bruges. Will culture redeem these reprobates? (And what, by the way, was the priest doing with the child?) The EU policy to ease passage across borders enables them to try elevating themselves through art.

McDonagh has a great sense of fun, which you worry about a bit when his film takes its plodding time to begin its story. We see Ken (Gleeson) and younger Ray (Colin Farrell) take in the sights of the city, an extraordinary place. Nowhere in the press notes did I see that the city of Bruges was a partner in the movie, which warns you that there might be hired killers in your hotel. It can't be all that good for tourism. But as we learn, thanks to McDonagh's flair for the absurd, hired killers are people, too. They love art - at least one of them does. They have a mentor-student bond, and Ken will protect Ray when their lunatic boss back in England (Ralph Fiennes) orders that the child-killer be killed, mashing a telephone to bits from his posh house in what looks like Oxfordshire (as at least one McDonagh character has done on-stage). The wild man then turns up in Bruges to pull the trigger when Ken loses his nerve.

In Bruges gets amusingly nutty when Ken and Ray take to the streets at night, and meet Chloe (Clemence Poesy), a drug-dealing gamine servicing a film crew. They also meet one of her best clients (Jordan Prentice), who is shooting a Dutch film there. The film becomes a march, and then a chase, through a medieval fun-house, set to the music of Carter Burwell, who (no surprise) has written music for a number of films by the Coen Brothers, an influence here.

One of the film's wildest scenes is a drug-fest with Farrell, Prentice and some whores from Amsterdam (one of them responds to Farrell's question as to why she's in Bruges, saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "there's more in it here for my pussy.") In what might be called the film's Tarantino soliloquy, Prentice predicts a future race war which will, among other Boschian ordeals, pit "Black dwarves against White dwarves." It's the sort of scene that makes you think, "I knew there was a reason why people took drugs," but you're also thinking, "Now that's a film I would pay money to see." It's crazy enough to have been pulled out of Chaucer.

In Bruges has plenty of these crazy moments, plus a violent arrhythmia of explosions of temper that you might expect from hit men under stress. If the serenity of Bruges can't calm them down, what can?

McDonagh ends his film with the gruesome consequences of deciding between preserving your honor and preserving yourself, and there's plenty of raw dialogue testing the honor among killers before the inevitable splat on the cobblestones. His filmmaking isn't all there yet, but McDonagh's dialogue sure is. Reason enough for writers to see In Bruges. They're on strike. What else do they have to do?

A film that couldn't be more different is Ballast, the first feature by Lance Hammer, set in winter in the Mississippi Delta, where the sky is either grey or rainy, and the fields are rows of puddles that extend beyond the trailers out into the distant horizon. Hammer, a set designer for studio films, has made anything but a commercial film. He says he was struck by the tone of the place, and his story, acted by non-professionals from the area where Ballast is filmed, is as grim as the landscape. Think of the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet. Think of Bruno Dumont.

A large black man is found dead of an overdose of pills in a house set in the middle of the fields. (Information is provided meagerly as the film unfolds.) The dead man's twin is near death with a gunshot wound, but his life is saved. From the ruins of those lives, we see other lives that depend on them, not the best of fates - James, a boy being raised by a single mother, who seems to be fending for himself emotionally, now that the man who turns out to have been his father is dead; Marlee, his mother, abandoned by the dead man, who works at a dead-end job as a janitor, and then gets fired; and Lawrence, the twin of the dead man, who seems ready to give up on life.

Soon, although nothing in this film happens all that quickly, we see that James has begun hanging out with the drug dealers whom he admires, and he owes money to teenagers in a local gang, who speak a monosyllabic argot that might as well be subtitled. If these young hoods had more style, they would remind you of the fighters in Asger Leth's Ghosts of the Cite Soleil in empty space, young men with no future. Their careers seem to be the next step in life for most boys like James in this corner of Mississippi, where there is no economy. The boy stays afloat in his debt to them by shaking Lawrence down for money with a stolen gun, but there's not enough to settle what he owes. He extorts more money with the gun from his Uncle Lawrence. When he fires at members of the gang, they force his mother's car off the road and beat them both. The realism is as grim as the landscape.

Somehow this is a welcome dose of shock therapy for all involved. Marlee takes over Lawrence's store, and James begins a home school course. But relations sour after Lawrence makes an extreme show of affection toward his dead brother's ex-wife, and the family falls into crisis again. We're left hanging, as they head off in a car toward a grey destination.

Here's what Lance Hammer has to say about his film:

There is an energetic resonance in the Delta that moves me, especially in winter. It has to do with the dignity of endurance in the face of sorrow. Being energetic in nature, language is inherently incapable of communicating the totality of the sensation. For many years, I've had the desire to make a film that, at its core, is an attempt to convey some portion of this essentially tonal phenomenon. Because tone is inherently formless, I realized that some degree of narrative structure would be required - some poles to give form to an amorphous tent. My hope is that the narrative has remained minimal and unobtrusive. I hope that is has served to convey the sense of sorrow that envelops this beautiful and complicated place.

Ballast is a product of intensive collaboration with non-professional actors. With one exception, all characters are portrayed by residents of the Delta townships where the scenes were recorded and have no prior film acting experience. Though a script was created, it was not distributed. Scenario was discussed, then given form, in the course of a two-month rehearsal process. Actors contributed their own language to the rehearsals, dialogue evolved as the result.

All imagery was photographed in existing locations with available light on 35mm film.

Even taking this approach into account, Lance Hammer still wants his film to reach an audience, and this one just might. His producers, Andrew Adamson and Mark Johnson, have The Chronicles of Narnia and other more commercial movies on their resumes. Maybe they can help this ambitious uncommercial film have its moment in theaters. After all, isn't that part of what Sundance is supposed to be about, amid the limo-lock, extortionate prices and "gifting opportunities" - using your skills, contacts and cash to support an alternative to studio product?

- David D'Arcy

Note: Jordan Prentice was misidentified in an earlier version of the review as Peter Dinklage. Many thanks to Glenn Kenny for pointing out the mistake.

Meantime, the earlier In Bruges entry's been updated quite a bit.

Posted by dwhudson at January 18, 2008 8:18 AM