Two documentaries that I saw (a few years apart) at the True/False Film Festival depict similar kinds of Belgian ennui: a sullied modernity, a wounded masculinity, and a retreat from coordinated productive action and into the depths of addiction.
Petit Samedi is a mood piece, a thoughtfully-paced look at a man’s relationship with his mother as he navigates heroin dependence. Damien has a striking candor and a vulnerability that can’t fail to connect with viewers. This trailer excerpts the two scenes I remember best: Damien at the local tavern’s pinball machine, getting the stink-eye from a neighborhood boozer. And then his mother fretting and asking some kids whether they’ve seen her son, reluctantly mentioning that her “beau gamin” is in fact a 43 ½ year old. The movie’s extreme intimacy and access to private conversations derives from a fact that some viewers may never notice: the filmmaker is Damien’s sister.
As great as this movie was, it didn’t displace the Citizen Kane of Belgian addiction documentaries: Ne me quitte pas, the tragicomic saga of Marcel and Bob. While Petit Samedi sways woundedly to the strains of Leonard Cohen, NMQP opts for the alternately bleak and hysterical swoons of Samuel Beckett. Remarkably, both movies prominently refer to the great river of the Ardennes forest, the Meuse. Having burned to nothing in the time of Julius Caesar, the whole forest is replanted by hand. Fittingly, our heroes’ freedom feels constructed and constrained.
The insects in NMQP reflect the futility of their human counterparts: in the first scene, an ant flails crazily on top of a grocery store receipt: trapped, confused and lashing out pointlessly. It reminds me a little bit of the child torturing the cockroaches at the beginning of another of my favorite movies, The Wages of Fear.
Still, this picture has a superabundance of empathy, even as its view of humanity rounds us down to slithering beasts. Marcel and Bob cause frequent car accidents due to their insatiable alcoholism. They have thoroughly alienated their loved ones, although these relationships remain central to each of their lives.
Marcel is startlingly vulnerable, often teary, and frequently suicidal. He has a total incapacity for interacting with women. Cracking open a can of beer, he declaims loudly about his pain and the imminent end of his life, while Bob grins behind an unkempt beard. Bob’s a kindly rum-guzzler, and in the movie’s first moment of Beckett-esque futility, he invites the camera to find “the tree of his life” out in the woods. He explains that this is where he will end his life, right here under this tree…if he can find it…oh, shoot it’s been cut down…or maybe it’s over there! Bob is wandering in an environment of totally identical trees, of course.
It may be hard to discern the comedy in understated scenes like these, but when I saw this in a packed theater we were all rolling in the aisles. When a treatment provider asks Marcel if he has memory problems, the squint-pause he delivers is priceless. The great accomplishment of the movie is to sensitively capture the terrifying dislocations of modern life while also staying funny and charming and approachable.
A subtle theme, related to the presence of flailing bugs, is environmental devastation. Bob can’t find his soul-tree, but a bouncing air freshener in the car, on the way to the next crash, is tree-shaped. The Ardennes forest looms in the background but these guys huddle indoors and get loaded. Bob delivers a poem as they sit around the woodstove, about “when women had soft thighs and were not yet virtual.” Drinking water doesn’t sustain life – instead it causes vomiting.
These men are bereft of female companionship and of honest engagement with the natural environment. Marcel’s ex with her fashionable scarf and cellphone represents an urbanized feminine that eludes these lost men. Bob’s trip to the city to connect with his son is not too successful.
One of the movie’s more esoteric pleasures lies in the regionally particular language that these two men use. Marcel’s exclamation “Nom di Dju!” is a Walloon-accented version of a French curse. Bob alternates unpredictably between Flemish and French, just one more dislocation in a whole lifetime of them.
If none of this sounds like your thing, let me tell you that the final scene is absolutely worth the price of admission, and it crystallizes all the themes that have been developing. Marcel heads home, blotto, on a scooter down a mountain road with a fresh coating of snow. Snow is a miracle in 21st century Belgium, and Marcel proceeds to profane that miracle by sliding all over the road while somehow not falling. Somehow making it home despite everything: it’s a transcendent non-triumph that will stay with you a long time.
A diffident addict may be the best subject to explore the modern condition. His affliction burdens him with a permanent confusion and a loss of purpose. Which is something that Benelux has to deal with already.