belgium

JCVD (2008, Director: Mabrouk El Mechri): At just 47 years-old, Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD) is looking really old and tired. He’s a fading action hero like Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. What could be a better way to get back in the spot­light than make a film about your­self, warts and all? It worked for Pauly Shore, sort of.

Van Damme plays him­self in this action-comedy. He walks into a bank rob­bery and gets taken hostage with sev­eral others. The police mis­takenly believe that Van Damme has gone over the edge and that he alone is behind the rob­bery and hostage-taking.

This isn’t your typ­ical Van Damme action film. Instead, it exam­ines the nature of fame. It shows how false the notion of celebrity can be. The hostage crisis shows Jean-Claude to be a reg­ular guy who fears for his life in a dan­gerous situ­ation. He may be a famous Belgian movie star, but he’s also in the middle of a child cus­tody battle, broke, and losing movie roles to that damn Steven Seagal.

All of this leads up to a bizarre mono­logue whereby Van Damme looks dir­ectly at the camera and pours out his soul for 9 minutes. I’ve never seen any­thing like it, but the scene abso­lutely works. At the Q&A after the film, dir­ector Mabrouk El Mechri revealed that this entire scene was kept secret from the crew until the moment of shooting.

A lot of the scenes in JCVD were impro­vised. El Mechri had a script but quite often let the actors come up with their own dia­logue. The res­ults are very funny and in El Mechri’s words, “better than the dia­logue [he] came up with.”

This film gen­er­ated a lot of buzz at Cannes which is sure to con­tinue after the screen­ings in Toronto. Tonight’s crowd at the Ryerson Theatre loved the film and it was a great way to kick off the Midnight Madness pro­gram at TIFF ’08.

I found the film to be unique and quite enjoy­able des­pite the com­par­isons to Being John Malkovich (1999). If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the “Muscles from Brussels” then JCVD is your answer.

Tagged as: #tiff08, belgium

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Le Silence de Lorna (2008, Directors: Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne): Sadly, once again I come to the work of acclaimed film­makers with no pre­vious exper­i­ence of their work. The Dardenne brothers have been mining their own seam for many years now, exploring the lives of the poor, unglam­orous and des­perate in unfussy real­istic films. Their latest pro­voked polar­izing reac­tions at Cannes this year, where some found it styl­ist­ic­ally too sim­ilar to their pre­vious work, or them­at­ic­ally too much like other films about the inter­sec­tions of the old and new Europe. Luckily, I wasn’t car­rying that baggage.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman living in Belgium whose dream is to one day open a snack bar with her boy­friend Sokol. In order to be eli­gible for bank loans and other bene­fits, she enters a mar­riage of con­veni­ence with a heroin addict to gain her cit­izen­ship. We quickly learn, how­ever, that this is only a small part of a larger, darker scheme mas­ter­minded by a local small-time hood named Fabio. Both Lorna and her hus­band Claudy (Jeremie Renier, a stal­wart of the Dardennes’ recent films) have been paid, with the under­standing that Lorna will divorce Claudy as soon as she gains her cit­izen­ship so she can remarry a wealthy Russian, allowing him to obtain cit­izen­ship as well. At least that’s what Claudy thinks. But Fabio’s plan is to stage Claudy’s death from a heroin over­dose instead. Will Lorna go along with this decep­tion? At the begin­ning it appears that she will. She and Claudy live under the same roof, but keep sep­arate rooms and there is little in the way of sym­pathy. But when he decides that he wants to kick his habit and begins beg­ging her for help, Lorna’s atti­tude slowly begins to change. After a suc­cessful hos­pital stay, he is released and his rela­tion­ship with Lorna seems to enter pre­vi­ously unknown ter­ritory. The plan is in jeop­ardy because people who started off using each other start to feel con­nected. Fabio, mean­while, is des­perate to com­plete the deal with the Russian at all costs.

Dobroshi is in almost every frame of this film and she is won­derful, showing a single-minded stoicism punc­tu­ated with some unex­pected out­bursts of emo­tion. Remarkably, des­pite the dehu­man­izing aspects of the scheme, it’s one Lorna entered into will­ingly, and at no point is there any sexual exploit­a­tion. In fact, when sex does enter the pic­ture, it’s as an expres­sion of rebel­lion and of pas­sion, and it throws the whole greed-fuelled plan into dis­array. She soon comes to realize her power­less­ness and expend­ab­ility and by the end of the film, her dreams have been replaced with a des­perate desire simply to sur­vive. Along the way, though, this sol­itary and determ­ined figure becomes more alive and less alone, even as her carefully-ordered life loses all of its sta­bility. If this is minor Dardennes, I can’t wait to catch up on the major stuff.

Trailer

(9/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, belgium

{ Comments on this entry are closed }