Les convoyeurs attendent

It's wonderful to see that Shane Meadows is already exerting international influence - LES CONVOYEURS ATTENDANT shares many themes with A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS: the vague class identity above working but well below middle, the unhinged father, the abandoned urban milieu, the sense of adult failure, the barely concealed fascism underpinning modern urban life.

But if Meadows is an expert formalist, Mariage trades in images, and his coolly composed, exquisitely Surreal, monochrome frames, serve to distance the grimy and rather bleak subject matter, which, Meadows-like, veers from high farce to tragedy within seconds.

There are longueurs and cliches, but Poelvoorde is compellingly mad, an ordinary man with ordinary ambitions, whose attempts to realise them are hatstand dangerous; while individual set-pieces - the popcorn/pidgeon explosions; the best marriage sequence since THE DEAD AND THE DEADLY - manage to snatch epiphany from despair.

It does take a certain sense of humour and, perhaps, background experience, to see the funny side of this drama/comedy film. It's an unusual but most welcome genre. It's a parody, a pastiche, a slightly ironic homage to neorealist cinema, but I don't see why it wouldn't work as a heart-warming celebration of humanity when taken at its face value. I'm still searching for a way to watch it online, so far all I can see if DVD's... No, I don't get its title... :-/ Still, I consider it genius

LES CONVOYEURS ATTENDENT was the first film I saw in 2000 and I doubt I'll see a better one this year. This beautiful tragicomedy by Belgian filmmaker Benoît Mariage is set in the industrial wastelands of Wallonia. Benoît Poelvoorde plays a father who desperately wants his son to win a car (a Lada!) for him. To do this the son has to break the record opening doors. What the father actually wants his for his son to be someone, because he himself has never made it further as the reporter of local news for a newspaper ironically called L'Espoir (Hope). Of course nothing works out as planned. This film can best be compared to Aki Kaurismäki's DRIFTING CLOUDS, although it is more dramatic and the humour is darker. Just like in that film however the tone is more melancholic than depressing and the ending upbeat, without being unrealistically happy. The humour is absurd, without making the plot unbelievable, and Mariage finds stunning images in the bleak settings that never seem artificial. The best thing about LES CONVOYEURS ATTENDENT is the acting by Poelvoorde. This actor shot to fame with the also brilliant cult-classic C'EST ARRIVÉ PRÈS DE CHEZ VOUS in which he played the charismatic hitman Ben. Since then he only played two small roles in films that were not released in the Netherlands, because, as he said in an interview, he was not convinced of his own acting capabilities and all the roles he was offered were reprises of the Ben character. With his return to a leading role in LCA there should be no doubt anymore about his acting. He's simply brilliant as a man stupid and evil enough to put his family in misery, but smart enough to realize what he's done and be torn by remorse about it. A must see.

The movie is set in rural Belgium, in a place inhabited by poor, gloomy people who do not look like Julia Roberts or Hugh Grant. The "hero", a clueless photographer for a local newspaper, is a father who decides that his family deserves better : the only way out appears to be in the Guinness Books of Records. After a failed attempt at spitting olive stones as far as he can, he forces his son to be the next world champion of door openings so that the family can get a new car... This movie is a unique mix of gritty social comment (though not heavy-handed) and dark humour, something often to be found in recent movies from Belgium, the Netherlands and North of France (Benoit Poelvoorde was also the hero of "Man Bites Dog"). Some of the strangest people we meet (a Belgian Elvis, a school teacher right out of the 50's) are in fact playing themselves, and the scenario itself is based on the true story of a father who trained his 3-year old son to be a professional biker. Certainly not for all tastes, and with its share of very dark humour and a little brush of tragedy, and with a fantastic Poelvoorde, "Les convoyeurs" will please the viewers who enjoy "different" movies.

Strange... I like all this movie crew and dark humor movies; but didn't like this one at all! It's awful, horrible and surely not funny at all. Pity cannot do a whole movie plot, disgust either. And it was really boring. Long empty moments fills the movie; it could have been removed. It should have been in another shorter format, surely. Maybe i expected too much from the crew - like saving the movie lol -. It's also filled with overused clichés of characters and situations... I don't get it why people liked it... "Poetry", "hope"; nope 'mam, didn't see anything like that! ^^ All in all, it's empty and crude, pitiful and hopeless. Oh darn this one........