I wanted to go and see this because I was curious as to what a 'Belgian comedy' - how the film was advertised - would be like. I had a lovely Belgian evening: ate chips with mayonnaise and took a real Belgian waffle to eat in the cinema. I would hesitate to call this a comedy however.
It started off regularly enough. A Belgian cabaret singer, touring round old peoples' homes gets lost and breaks down in some godawful village in the middle of nowhere. In Belgium. The owner of the local inn, which has been all but abandoned, gives him somewhere to stay and for a start it's all rather farcical and a bit Diner de Cons: the innkeeper is a bumbling country bumpkin who doesn't really want Marc the cabaret singer to leave.
The first sign that something is a bit strange is when Marc goes for a walk and stumbles upon the rest of the villagers fucking a pig. At this point I wondered why he just didn't run as far away as possible...
Anyway, he wakes up one morning to find the innkeeper, Bartel, setting fire to his van. When Marc goes outside to stop him the innkeeper knocks him out; when he wakes up he discovers Bartel has tied him up, cut off his hair and dressed him in a dress which used to belong to his wife, who had left him several years ago. Bartel is happy, thinking that his wife Gloria has finally returned and Marc spends the rest of the film covered in dried blood, sobbing.
From then on things get a bit surreal. We see the rest of the villagers in the pub who begin some weird dancing and while Bartel is walking through the forest a group of red anorak'd children appears a la Don't Look Now. In the middle of a freaky Christmas dinner the villagers appear and attack Bartel's house. We assume it is to rescue Marc but they are really intent on capturing 'Gloria', who was apparently carrying on with all of them as well.
Marc manages to escape and thus begins the final scene of him being chased through the snowy forest which is really rather beautiful. At the very end, the last of the villagers chasing Marc almost catches up before he gets caught in a bog. Sinking, he implores 'Gloria' to tell him that she loved him. "Je t'aimais" whispers Marc, as he watches him slowly disappear....
Although it sounds weird (and it was), it was also very enjoyable. It was the surreal touches which made the film, they gave it a nightmarish quality and so it avoided being anything approaching a horror flick. Despite being a complete nutter Bartel was a rather pathetic character at times, which was what made the lurch from farce into nightmare all the more terrifying.
The scary thing is I deal with Belgians every day at work. I haven't been able to think of them in the same way since. 7.
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