On Movies: Where is Bruges? Action flick will answer

So

Martin McDonagh

was on holiday in Bruges, Belgium, and he was pleasantly surprised: the medieval architecture, the cobblestones, the canals.

That was the first day.

By the second, he was bored silly, wondering what people did for fun in this quaint burg. And he was wondering, too, why no one had used Bruges for the setting of a film.

"That's part of what I was thinking when I went there," says McDonagh, who has been best-known for a series of darkly funny, over-the-top, blood-gushing plays, including

The Pillowman

and

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

. "Because it's just so beautiful, every corner you turn there's an amazing building or street or little bridge. . . . And it hasn't changed for 400, 500 years. It's crazy that it hadn't really been used in films before."

So McDonagh decided to use it.

In Bruges

, which opens Friday at the Ritz Five and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ, was written and directed by the 37-year-old Londoner. It stars

Colin Farrell

and

Brendan

Gleeson

as Irish hit men sent to Bruges to hide out after a messy killing back in Britain.

Gleeson's character tumbles for the place and its Old World charm, going about with guidebook in hand and gleam in eye. Farrell's Ray can't stand Bruges, dissing the city and its rosy-cheeked populace in bursts of profanity. He taunts some heavyset American tourists, and gets embroiled in weird business with a beautiful drug dealer (

Clémence Poésy

) and a cocaine-addled, hooker-accompanied dwarf (

Jordan Prentice

).

Like McDonagh's pieces for the theater,

In Bruges

is violent, and, at times, violently funny. When

Ralph Fiennes

, playing the duo's mobbed-up boss, arrives on the scene, sleepy Bruges becomes the backdrop for a madcap shoot-'em-up.

"There are other beautiful towns, obviously, in Europe, but you couldn't use them because everyone knows them," explains McDonagh. "Venice has been done, and Prague and Paris, et cetera, et cetera, but the thing about Bruges is no one knows about it. Even the characters in the film are saying, 'Where is it?' That's part of the joke.

"Actually, if we hadn't been allowed to shoot there, I'd have scrapped the whole idea. Every location was very specific: the tower, and the canals, and the market square, it had to be there."

In Bruges

launched the Sundance Film Festival last month, and Focus Features has been running ads and trailers emphasizing the thriller aspects of the plot. (And why not?) The trailers also boast: "from Academy Award-winning director Martin McDonagh," which, amazingly enough - especially to McDonagh - is true.

"Six Shooter," a blood-splattered (of course) half-hour film starring Gleeson as a guy on a strange train ride, took the Oscar for best live-action short at the 2006 ceremonies. It was the first thing McDonagh had done with a camera and crew.

"That was crazy," McDonagh said, on the phone from New York the other day, remembering his march to the Kodak Theatre stage a little less than two years ago. "Very nice, obviously, but it was like a strange dream that happened to me, rather than anything I could get my head around. Kind of terrifying, but kind of cool, too."

It's pointed out to McDonagh that it took

Martin Scorsese

16 years and seven films before he won an Academy Award, and here's this novice from England who literally strikes gold the first time out.

"It's terrible, isn't it?" he says with a laugh. "And it's strange that Scorsese hadn't won for so long. He's probably my favorite American filmmaker, along with

Terrence Malick

, who also hasn't won one. All those Scorsese/

Keitel

/

DeNiro

films - they were a big influence for me when I was growing up."

McDonagh says that he has a couple of screenplays ready to go, and plans to write a play in the coming year, too - but he's not guessing when any will be staged, or shot.

"I don't want to do anything for a couple of years," he says. "I just want to go away and travel and grow up and see what kind of person I've become. Just get off of this bandwagon - which is a great bandwagon to be on. . . .

"But just to step back and be a person for a while would be good."

Marinca, of "4 Months" and "Youth."

Actress

Anamaria Marinca

, of Iasi, Romania, has two movies opening in Philadelphia this weekend. She is the star of

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

, the hard, harrowing

Cristian Mungiu

film about a young woman seeking an illegal abortion in 1980s Communist Romania. The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and Marinca, who plays the pregnant student's friend, assisting her in her terrifying termination, is amazing.

In

Youth Without Youth

,

Francis Ford Coppola's

goofy yarn about a wizened old linguist (

Tim Roth

) who becomes young and strong - and gains weird psychic powers - after being hit by lightning, Marinca can be seen as a hotel receptionist. Not a big part, but one that got her work with "one of the most amazing artists of our time," she says.

"And getting to meet Tim Roth, and getting to have a whole day with them both - I was really spoiled."

Marinca, 29, is based in London now, where she has found work on stage (

Measure for Measure

at the National Theater) and TV (the miniseries

Sex Traffic

and

The Last Enemy

).

But she eagerly returned to Romania to do

4-3-2

, as she calls it. She was 9 at the time the film is set, but the dark legacies of the

Ceausescu

regime had an impact on her, and everyone in her homeland, long after the Communist dictatorship fell.

"It's a difficult film to watch," she concedes, on the phone from London. "It's not easy to face the realities of that time - and to think that most of the audience in Romania have gone through that. For them, it's not something that happened far away. It's reliving their own history, their own memory."

Both

4-3-2

and

Youth

are playing at the Ritz at the Bourse.