Saturday 10 May 2008

"In Bruges"

If you go to see this film, you will notice that it's a fairly flabby plot with loads of touristy cut-away shots of Bruges. Hmm. The baddy is English and in-between they make fun of a Canadian couple. If you watch the closing credits *yawn* the thing is an Irish-Belgian co-production, the only name that you'd recognise is Film4.

I work in tax, so it dawned on me fairly early on that the real sub-plot is, the producers went round the world seeing where they could get the most subsidies; the Irish Film Board and Tourism Flanders-Brussels presumably opened their coffers wider than the UK Film Council or the Canada Feature Film Fund.

For sure, Film4 is funded by the English taxpayer, but like most quangos they are full of national self-loathing, so happy to put their names to something like this.

I suppose if you were really old and/or sophisticated, you'd point out the allusions to Don't Look Now, with the whole canals, child/dwarf mix up thing going on ... only thankfully I'm not that old.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

But Bruges really is lovely. Like Mrs Sarkozy, really.