The Banshees of Inisherin
In Inisherin, not In Bruges. It’s an improvement, since the protagonists are depressed common people, instead of depressed hitman.
Much has been written about this, with all the Oscar nominations and all, but it’s really a kind of Martin McDonagh best of. A butterfly flapped its wings just before the film starts, and eventually someone dies and a house is burned down. It’s also absolute catnip for the Oscars: unnecessary setting the story in the past (it worked just as well in a modern rural setting), the civil war in the background mimicking the protagonist’s conflict, meta commentary on the artistic creation.
This ranks pretty high on the cosmopolitrometer, living in a small isolated island is hell for non-dunces, it’s better to jump into a raging civil war than to stay longer than absolutely necessary.
For our protagonist dunce, life is good by just wasting way its life on the pub, talking about donkey shit for hours. For more sophisticated people, like his sister and the other protagonist, life is more than just surviving. There are higher purposes, like art. Just “being nice” to one another is not enough
Millions of people were nice through the ages, but only Mozart’s name is remembered through the centuries. Life requires a purpose.
Of course, pursuing art without being nice is usually admissible to the royals, but not so to other people.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.