The Misfortunates

Known in France as La Merditude des choses, this is a film I've been hunting for ages and finally tracked down on a chilly summer day.

It's the story of a kid grown up, recounting his childhood in a small Belgian village with a dysfunctional family, sometimes filled with hope and joy, more often steeped in social misery and violence.

It's the kind of film that pulls a smile out of you, only to snatch it back before long. There's a bit of Strip-tease or Groland in this romanticized yet raw portrayal of broken, rough-around-the-edges characters who grapple with love and alcoholism, meltdowns and solidarity, all caught in their vices while trying to survive a monotony that's slowly killing them.

You laugh, sometimes. There are scenes so bizarre-like a nude bike race, a betting shop session with a kid that ends in a conga line with two dwarf barmaids, or a booze-fueled Tour de France with deliberately dizzying camera work. But every one of these moments hides something deeply, achingly sad.

It's as if Koen Mortier's Skunk softened up just enough to hook up with an old Kervern and Délépine flick. The story centers on this man who somehow escaped his circumstances and narrates his origins with a mix of disgust and nostalgia, aware that he was built on shaky foundations, yet equally clear-eyed about his present, which he views with almost the same lens. That realization might be the saddest part of the whole thing. The sordid, seen through innocent, childlike eyes, may not be worse than the banality of adulthood. Both chip away at the soul, but the nostalgia of the former makes it easier to hold onto.

It's a depressing film with beautiful things inside. Alcoholism is depicted raw and intense, the most brotherly moments are also the most fleeting, reflecting a life nobody really chose but has to live anyway, elevated by a literary narration that adds depth and insight to this mess-a child's view of the underside of a medal he never even got to win.

Superbly acted, smartly paced, striking a balance between darkness and levity, text and visuals, it's a fantastic surprise that'll stick with me for a while. Plus, it taught me some raunchy Dutch drinking songs I can't wait to belt out at three sheets to the wind on my next trip to Utrecht.

... 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.

I know one shouldn't mix reviews with personal experiences, but when watching this film I couldn't help but constantly remember an anecdote that happened to me one New Year's morning in Brussels: trying to cure my party hangover with some friends in a bar, we observed a guy trying to cross the street with a crate of beer. Now the streets were all frozen over and the king had advised in his New Year's address to stay at home. Plus the roads in Brussels are caved in by traffic. So the weight of the crate kept the guy sliding towards the middle of the street. He could make it to either side without, but not with the crate. Nevertheless, he kept trying for over an hour to pull, shove or otherwise move the crate from where it was stuck - until he found the ingenious solution: He drank six bottles of beer on the spot, thereby sufficiently reducing the weight to pull the crate over - only that he got so drunk and spaced out in the process that he slipped and broke all of the bottles, so his whole effort came to naught.

This little story has nothing and everything to do with 'Misfortunates' which is chock full of incidents like this one. And as abundant films about losers and social misfits may be in Belgian/ Dutch cinema (like Aaltra, The Sexual Life of Belgians, Flodders, Spetters), this one takes the cake in every respect: the autobiographical story is perfectly adapted and wonderfully played. Its provides tons of utterly irrelevant, but amusing add-ons like when the Strubbes invite themselves over to an exiled Iranian couple to force them into watching a Roy Orbison concert because their TV's been repossessed. Like in my little story, one cannot help but somewhat admire the persistence of the Strubbe family to make their lives as dysfunctional as humanly possible, while one cannot ignore the destructiveness of it all.

If you like painfully real social dramedy, this one is for you; if your threshold for witnessing the lower recesses of human behavior isn't very high, you're likely to find 'Misfortunates' an extremely tasteless affair.

This is a damn good film. I think it sort of goes from being a very low-brow comedy into an interesting examination of a very dysfunctional family and how that shapes Gunther's own life as an adult. The thing about the movie is that under all the "ugliness" the Strobbes display through their behavior, the film is certainly very heartfelt and honest about how it portrays its characters. Sure they may be ugly, unlikable, drunkards, gamblers...but they feel like a real family and that's what the film gets across greatly. They do feel like a very close and tight-knit family and you get to see their ups and downs, mostly downs really, and how they relate to each other. So it's a very well-written film, it's also well-acted but there's something about the film, it's not really a flaw, but somehow the film is content with just being very good, it never feels great. There's some inspired stuff here but it's never great and I'm not sure what the reason is for that. But at least it's still a damn good film about a fascinating family.

I saw this last month at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival where the film's director Felix van Groeningen attended my screening to take an audience Q&A following the film. Adapted from the Dimitri Verhulst novel by van Groeningen and Christopher Dirickx this is the story of young Gunter Strobe (Kenneth Vanbaeden) being brought up by his single and alcoholic father Marcel (Koen de Graeve) after his mother walked out on them. They live at grandma Strobe's (Gilda de Bal) house along with Gunter's hard partying uncles Petrol (Wouter Hendrickx), Beefcake (Johan Heldenbergh) and Koen (Bert Haelvort). the white trash family is so out of control that it's amazing that social services haven't taken Gunter out of this environment a long time ago, although they have threatened to. It's grandma Strobe with the only sensibility and sense of stability and guidance that keeps Gunter in the home but she has reached the point of exasperation in her the behavior of her sons. Valentijn Dhaenens plays the older Gunter looking back at his his childhood years and giving gratitude to his grandmother. this is an excellent cast. I only wish the grandmother's character was more developed and their was more of an on screen presence of her and also a little more of Gunter's mother and her marriage years to Marcel. The character of uncle Koen is underdeveloped as well. Many might find this film about a distasteful family distasteful as well but there is a lot to like in this relatively slow film and lots of dark comedy and genuine tragedy. This was Belgium's official submission to the 82nd Academy Awards for Best foreign Language film. It's van Groeningen's third film and the third time is a charm and I like this film. I'll look forward to more from the young director and more with a bigger budget hopefully. I loved the Roy Orbison scene. I would recommend this and give it an 8.5 out of 10.