Sunday, July 22, 2012
"Bullhead": crime drama from Belgium with a life-stopping backstory
It
would sound strange to most American film buffs that you could do much in film
with an obscure cultural battle within Belgium between the Flemish and the
French Walloons, and that there is such a thing as a Belgian livestock mafia.
We don’t think about farming in Europe and the “Low Countries” now
in days of battles over finances and the euro.
Nevertheless,
when a young cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts), who we
see pumping himself with shots of steroids and testosterone, sets a web of
tragedy and intrigue in motion when he is approached by a veterinarian to deal
with a Flemish beef trader. His chance to prove his manhood socially is
set off in motion, and we see this previous quiet bodybuilder going to the dark
side.
That’s
the setup of “Bullhead” (or “Rundskop”), a 2011 Oscar nominee for best foreign
language film by Michael R. Roskam, now on DVD from Image and DraftHouse.
There’s a horrific backstory that layers upon the current day murder
mystery that ensues. There’s a clue in Jacky’s womanish skin, which the
camera sometimes indulges. About forty minutes into the film, we
see a reenactment of an incident two decades before when Jacky, just starting
to learn about the meaning of sex and girls at age 10, is attacked by a girl’s
brother Bruno (David Murgia) who chops off all that matters.
Subsequently the doctors put Jacky on testosterone for life, and his father
even asks, “Will he be gay?”
In
fact, Jacky’s adult friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), lean but prematurely
bald, is gay, and Jacky doesn’t know it; and that hardly matters in the final
web of coincidences that get Jacky framed for a dealer’s murder. (It’s
rather like saying that the character Will’s homosexuality in the soap “Days of
our Lives” is turning out not to mean much now.) In the middle of the
film, there’s a more recent flashback where Jacky goes to a straight disco
(playing the same music I hear all the time at Town DC), and is told he has to
wear a shirt. That’s odd, as shirt removal is a ritual in “love trains” in gay
discos; for that matter, I’ve also wondered why some straight discos didn’t
allow tennis shoes.
This
is a brooding film, over two hours, with a string score by Raf Kuenen, music in
C# minor (I checked on my Casio) that reminds one of Richard Strauss’s
“Metamorphesen.” Toward the end, there is a staircase that recalls the
effect of a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo".
On
the DVD, the director, after explaining that the rural mafia and other
conflicts in Belgium are real, talks about the characters. He compares
Jacky to Batman, someone who wants to be big after a childhood trauma, and even
mentions the analogy of locking himself in the bathroom. (It is a total
coincidence that I had rented this DVD the weekend of the Batman-related
tragedy -- the DVD came out rather quickly after a brief theatrical run spurred
by the Oscars -- but Roskam's comments seem accidentally all too relevant.) In
a similar interview, the actor Matthias explains that, because of the childhood
assault, Jacky will never be able to "give love" the way a man
normally does, even if he receives it.
The
"Making Of" short on the DVD shows how Matthias bulked up for the
part, using special nutritious supplements with fish (a kind of "muscle
milk"), somewhat reminiscent of how Taylor Lautner did the same thing for
the Twilight movies (not a good idea normally at age 16). I cannot fathom
altering my vulnerable body for a movie -- except maybe my own!
The
language of the film is Limburgish, a form of Dutch heavily influenced by
German. The film showed at AFI-Los Angeles and Palm Springs film
festivals.
The
official site is here.
Image
rents the film on YouTube “legally” for $3.99.
The
DVD has a 25-minute short, “The One Thing to Do” (“Une seule chose a
faire”), from CCCP and Arte France, where Schoeanaerts and Tibo Vanderborre
play two young “pre-terrorists” meeting with an older mercenary (Serge
Henri-Valcke) in an outdoor restaurant in Corisca. After an ideological
discussion (with some combat flashbacks, that seem to be relate to the Bosnian
civil war in the 90s) about how it’s important to make everybody in the world
play the game of life by the same rules, a plot twist occurs (along with some
scenes of mass bodies) where the mercenary is to be apprehended for war crimes.
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