benoit-3

... you can always count on tears, blood, placenta and spilt beer.

Having said this, this film uses all of them to good effect. This brutal confrontation with the Flanders of Pieter Brueghel and Jacques Brel, is not without its pathetic and touching moments. It reminded me a lot of Quebec's "C.R.A.Z.Y" in its enthusiasms for its subject but with, of course, much more squalor.

The actors are all convincing and attractive in their own way and the direction is transparent and unobtrusive. The viewer should be warned that the opus is generously peppered with scenes of fornication, sometimes public, pissing, sometimes public, defecation, sometimes public, vomiting, sometimes public, public male nudity and transvestism, not to mention lots and lots of binge drinking.

I liked the anecdote in the "making of" documentary telling how one of the father's fake moustaches was fashioned from the male actors' and crew's pubic hair. It seemed fitting somehow.

There are many reasons for the film's success. It is imaginative and daring in its concept, actually basing its story on a real incident of formaldehyde poisoning caused by American military negligence. This aspect of the film makes it very political: the real villain here is not the monster, it's the American hubris and incompetence that created the monster and invented a virus scare to cover-up its idiocy.

The viewer's interest is maintained throughout not only with stunningly integrated special effects but by the great humanity of the characters, even the secondary ones. These are presented to the audience in cursory but satisfying fashion, then elaborated. This is called character development and it is almost totally absent from dumbed-down mainstream American movies these days.

The plot is also full of surprising twists which add to the complexity of the characters instead of subtracting from it. The ending is surprising, heroic and disquieting and a long ways away from Hollywood's traditional happy end.

The whole thing is held together by technical brilliance in special effects, dialogue writing, photography, art direction, lighting, sets, acting, directing, visual imagination, suspenseful editing and a magnificent score that alternates between a Fellini slice-of-life score by Nino Rota and the romantic effulgence of Michel Legrand.

In short, this film is so advanced it can probably never be topped by anything on this side of the Atlantic for a long time.