THE UNKNOWN GIRL (LA FILLE INCONNUE) — CANNES 2016

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Cannes, France — Few things are as embarrassing than having a flop in the competition at Cannes. The trouble with the Dardenne brothers is that they probably won't get the memo about just how awful their latest cinematic offering is.

It does a disservice to cabbage to compare the vegetable to Adele Haenel’s dreary portrayal of Jenny, a doctor turned amateur investigator after a black girl is murdered near her character’s one-woman medical practice.

In American parlance, you would call Jenny a "pill." Melancholic, moody, and clinically depressed are other terms that apply.  That same labels could be applied to the miserable personality of every character in "The Unknown Girl." The social mood of the picture is so oppressive that you'll never want to visit Belgium after seeing it.

The premise for the story is as tedious and overwrought as they come. It's clear that Jenny (Haenel) doesn't know the first thing about managing employees from the atrocious way she treats her only assistant. It's no wonder that he quits 10 minutes into the film. From her actions, we also know that Jenny isn't fit to practice medicine. A young black girl desperately knocks on the door of Jenny's practice after hours. Jenny ignores the girl, and refuses to let her in. Perhaps she harbors a tad of racism.

The next day the black girl turns up dead. Now, suddenly Jenny grows a conscience. She feels more guilt than a Catholic schoolgirl after borrowing her mother's vibrator. Jenny blames herself for the girl's death, and goes all Columbo even after a police investigator tells her she's crossing the line. That's the artificial set-up for a movie that may as well have no protagonist at all. Death comes with the territory of being a doctor. If Jenny can't handle the passing of someone who wasn't even a patient, just imagine how she'll respond when loses one.  

The Dardennes have created a new sub-genre. You’ve heard of neo-realism; well “The Unknown Girl” is neo-fakeism. This is cinema to slit your wrists to.

Not Rated. 113 mins. 

 

MAN BITES DOG — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Self-reflexive social satire rarely comes with such a hilarious fury of black humor as it does in this ingenious mockumentary about filming a serial killer’s pursuits. This ahead-of-its-time movie kicks its audience in its reality-TV-loving teeth.

The incendiary character/social study was created and executed by four aspiring film students from Belgium for a school graduation project. Andre Bonzel, Benoit Poelvoorde, and Remy Belvaux co-write, direct, and act as an ersatz cinema vérité crew, filming Benoit (aka Ben), an amiable murderer with nice clothes, good friends, loving parents, an active social life, and closely held beliefs on every imaginable topic.

Ben is also an accomplished musician (he plays piano in a classic music duo with his childhood girlfriend). He even writes poetry. Ben is a sophisticated and socialized psychopath.

With his beautifully blunted French nose, Benoit Poelvoorde’s exceedingly articulate character represents a specific stereotype of a Gallic bon vivant man-child. He’s a man of the people, and of the people he kills without regret, children included. Ben likes to philosophize at length, directly into the camera of course, about social realities he finds disappointing. He also likes to knock off (kill) a mailman at the beginning of every month.

Ben’s quick wit, and loose physicality, is infectious. This guy is a smoothie. Wearing a suit with his tie tucked into his shirt; Ben sits by a river in front a nuclear reactor. He explains to us the various weight ratio formulas needed to ballast the different types of corpses he disappears there — midgets, old people etc. However, Ben’s humane argument in support of stylistically appealing architecture for low-income housing, sits distantly opposite to his occupation as a wanton killer and thief.

In its opening scene Ben strangles a woman on a train. He really puts himself into his work. We will witness Ben commit countless other unprovoked killings, many in startling quick-cut montages, throughout the movie. Still, we can’t help but empathize with Poelvoorde’s insatiable creation for his generosity of spirit if nothing else. It’s logical to extrapolate from the film’s theme of obligatory killing as a hazard that people like American police officers feel necessary to compulsively commit. An especially admirable aspect of the film’s satire is how universally it can be construed, and/or applied to a myriad of capitalist-based situations.

Jean Luc Godard’s influence is all over this black-and-white picture. Travelling handheld camera shots enable sudden chase sequences to ignite. For his part, Ben could be a first cousin to Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel character in Goddard’s 1960 breakthrough picture “Breathless.” In his natty sports coat Ben is a stylish rogue infatuated with women, and with murder. John McNaughton’s “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (1986) also appears to have been influential on this film.

The camera crew follows Ban to a reservoir where he dumps the covered-and-tied corpses of his victims. The sight of Ben’s victims’ corpses falling from a great height while banging off a rocky cliff is disturbing for the matter-of-fact way the imagery is depicted. Here is an example of many such sequences, made more ostensibly authentic due to the picture’s cheap film stock.

“Man Bites Dog” premiered at Cannes in 1992 where its French title “C'est Arrive Pres de Chez Vous” translates roughly to “It Happened in Your Neighborhood.” It embraces all of the typical bourgeoisie tropes of middle-class French society, and then lets loose one of their own against them. The movie’s sense of tragedy is as profound as its black comedy.

Rated NC-17. 95 mins. 

THE KID WITH A BIKE — CANNES 2011

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The Dardenne brothers tweak their polished neorealist formula of personalized socially conscious cinema. Once again, we are exposed to their hometown of Serain, Belgium. This time, however, composed music plays a central role.

The Dardennes continue the focus of their oeuvre on the plight of Belgian youth. The result is a somewhat less than convincing story about a troubled 11-year-old boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret).

Having been recently abandoned by his single-parent father Guy (Jérémie Renier), Cyril searches desperately for his missing dad and for his bicycle, which has also gone MIA.

The manic boy escapes from a boys' home to return to the empty apartment he once occupied with his father. Pursued and dragged by his keepers back into the group home, Cyril throws himself at a visiting woman waiting in the home’s lobby.

Hairdresser Samantha (Cecile de France) helps Cyril find his bike and agrees to look after the violence-prone boy on weekends. Samantha is at a loss to understand Cyril’s self-destructive impulses, which land him in a string of violent altercations. Still, Cyril's fortunes improve when Samantha agrees to keep him with her full time. Cyril’s guardian angel helps him track down his deadbeat dad at a restaurant where he works. Guy eventually makes clear he wants nothing to do with his needy son.

The filmmakers explore too shallowly Guy's reasoning for essentially throwing his son away. This, coupled with a lack of perspective on Samantha's backstory, weighs heavy on the film as a narrative contrivance that is fortunately mitigated by Thomas Doret’s exceptional performance.

In spite of its all-too-obvious machinations, “The Kid with a Bike” touches on social ills in a straightforward fashion without preaching. When Cyril falls in with a neighborhood thug to perform a violent crime with no reason other than to try to win the approval of an older male figure, we see clearly what the filmmakers are getting at. A kid with a bike is nothing without both a mother and a father.

Not Rated. 87 mins.