Raphaël Balboni and Ann Sirot's Une vie démente | Madly in Life (2021)

Under the circumstances, in many respects this is a strangely amusing film. Noémie (Lucie Debay) and her husband Alex (Jean Le Peltier) have decided to have a child, and are obviously anxious to ensure that all goes well. However, the odd behaviour of Alex's mother Suzanne (Jo Desure) will put the event on hold for a while, and cause a large amount of trouble, pain and general frustration for them.

The first thing Noémie and Alex notice is that when Suzanne comes to visit them she parks in the space allocated to the handicapped: nothing much to cause a fuss about there. Then when they're preparing a family meal in the kitchen and Alex asks his mother to pass the colander she ignores him: again, there doesn't seem to be any great cause for concern. But then when Alex notes that his mother, quite casually, steals a cigarette lighter from a shop, things begin to get worrying. Next, Suzanne has trouble with her credit cards when a terminal in another shop registers that she has no funds, which she 'knows' to be untrue. It's only when Alex sees what a mess she's making of her accounts, and – much more seriously – that she falsely declared herself retired two years before, although she's been working and collecting a five-figure sum under false pretences, that Alex realises that she has a real problem.

The diagnosis is the onset of Alzheimer's, and when Alex sees that she's switched off her fridge and left rotting food in it, he recognises that she'll have a home help. After a few interviews, this is found in the shape of the very knowledgeable and affable Kevin (Gills Remiche).

Meanwhile, any movement on the baby front has to be postponed, in fact left to vegetate: we see Alex and Noémie in bed with computer and a book, both with the same green, floral patern which matches the sheets, pillows, curtains, lampshade, etc. It is, of course, an image of madness, but it can only get worse because Suzanne's illness is degenerative.

In addition to this problem, Suzanne is hyperactive, makes a great deal of noise, at one point enters a stranger's house and begins having a meal at the kitchen table until she's discovered by the nonplussed occupants, so Kevin has to work hard to keep her under a kind of house arrest without actually making a prisoner of her.

Anti-psychotic drugs have the effect of turning her into a cabbage until the dosage is reduced and she regains some semblance of normality. And we finally see her in a role reversal: as she sits at a table on the lawn next to her son's baby, Noémie feeds it while Alex feeds his mother. Crazy this film certainly is, although this tragi-comedy strikes a healthy balance by treating a serious terminal illness in a mature way.

Zoé Wittock's Jumbo (2020)

Zoé Wittock calls this film a 'romantic fairy story', which it certainly is, and she was inspired to make it on learning that Erika Eiffel had married the Tour d'Eiffel: in fact she sought out Erika to visit her before making the film. Jeanne Tantois (Noémie Merlant in a brilliant performance) is a young woman living with her mother Marguerette (Emmanuelle Bercot), now in a single-parent relationship and who only with difficulty could be more different from her daughter: Marguerette is a non-too-bright bartmaid eager for sexual encounters she can come upon; Jeanne works in an amusement park (actually Plopsa Coo in Belgium), is very shy and sexually inexperienced, and quite possibly at some low level in the autistic spectrum, but then who isn't?

Wittock didn't choose the Tour Eiffel as it is too static, but tentatively Jeanne develops a relationship with the machine Move-It, which she renames Jumbo and which she rapidly falls in love with, reading signs from the machine that it is responding to her attentions. The park director Marc (Bastien Bouillon) is attracted to her but can't understand her. As she tends the park at night she gets to see Jumbo a great deal, and on one occasion has an orgasm: the oil from the machine is seen in the light of sexual fluid, and there's an almost surreal sequence in which she bathes in the oil.

If the main theme is objectophilia, the sub-plot is the intolerance of humans towards difference, of not accepting people and ridiculing them because they don't fit in with the norm: her mother thinks she's crazy; Marc (who on one occasion has indifferent sex with her but still lusts after her) is as insensitive as her mother: at the annual amusement park ceremony he presents Jeanne with an employee of the year award, and then says that Move-It is moving on because (falsely he claims) it's not attaracting enough people. On stage Jeanne attacks him.

Later, Marguerette's new boyfriend Hubert – who has previously remained in the background and not seemed to have much to say – berates Marc for his intolerance and tells him to leave Marguerette's property, only to turn to her, criticise her for her intolerance and inhumanity to Jeanne, and promptly leaves Marguerette. Yes, Marguerette has a lot of growing up to do very quickly, and almost the final scene shows her, Hubert and Jeanne standing underneath Jumbo, with Hubert and Marguerette (separately) playing the role of vicar, with Jeanne dressed in white with a bridal veil.

For a first feature this is a stunning movie, and let's be honest: it's an important one too.

Rémy Belvaux's C'est arrivé près de chez vous | Man Bites Dog (1992)

Rémy Belvaux's C'est arrivé près de chez vous (which is rather sensationally translated as Man Bites Dog) is a brilliant but much misunderstood first feature: certainly it is overlong and repetitive, but it can hardly be accused of gratuitous violence because that is the whole point. This film is essentially a profound criticism of, and satire on, the media's approach to violence, the fact that the media wallows in violence in order to capture its audience, to make more money. This is a mockumentary starring casual serial killer Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde), who is followed all the time by Belvaux and André Bonzel, with all of them more or less carrying their own first names.

As the film continues, the two members of the crew (at first distant) become increasingly involved in Ben's murders: they even gang rape one of his victims before him, and help him dispose of his bodies, which he weighs down with concrete ballast so they won't float to the surface. This activity is symbolised at one point when Ben is drinking with the other two, when he plays a game with them in a bar, in which he submerges an olive attached to a sugar cube in each of their drinks and the loser, whose olive floats to the surface first, has to buy the next round. He calls the game 'le petit Grégory', referring to the (still unsolved) murder of the fifteen-year-old Grégory Villemin in 1984, whose body was fished out of the Valogne. I learn that 'le petit Grégory' is translated by the expression 'Dead Little Boy'! Great film, but it's a pity about the sub-titling.

Tim Mielants's De Patrick | Patrick (2020)

This is Belgian Tim Mielants's first feature film, set in a nudist camp, and in Flemish, French and English: it was inspired by Mielants's experience of a naturist site in the Pyrenees, although the setting here is the Ardennes. And although nudism isn't obligatory fat bellies and dangling penises are all over the place and provide a humorous backcloth to a movie very much concerned with existential anguish.

The main character is Patrick (Kevin Janssens) whose ailing father Rudy (Josse De Pauw) owns the site, which has regular meetings run on a highly organised, most business-like fashion, everything being taken ultra-seriously: the fact that almost all the members of the meetings as completely naked evidently makes this very amusing.

Patrick not only helps in the running of the camp site but also lives in his workshop where he makes extremely well crafted furniture which he'd prefer to give away rather than sell. And then he loses his favourite hammer and his father dies. The hammer becomes not only a symbol of paternal loss but a vital part of the grieving process – it seems that finding the hammer will finally put his father to rest: it can no coincidence that 'marteau', French for hammer, is also an old-fashioned French slang word for 'crazy'. Come to that, the 'De Patrick' could even indicate 'On Patrick', as if it were a philosophical tract.

But I prefer the 'de' as an indicator of aristocracy, as in 'de Musset', 'de Vigny', etc: Patrick is heir to his father's property, the camp site. And the scheming Herman (Pierre Bokma), wife of Liliane (Ariane van Vliet) – with whom Patrick has boring (for him) sex – is planning to take over the camp site by proving that the grieving hammerless Patrick is unfit to run it.  There follows a naked fight  which has none of the sensuality of Ken Russell's nude male fighting in Women in Love, but is in fact very violent although it finishes in comical fashion with the caravan tipping up on its side.

Eventually the hammer is discovered: it has been taken by an outsider to use to crush someone's skull. The murderer is discovered, Patrick returns to the camp site and is greeted by everyone as before. But he'll never get his hammer back.

One of the posters used to advertise the film is a mock-up of the Kinks's album Percy, although with a hammer used in the genital area instead of a fig leaf (and a bigger belly): the Kinks's music was used in the film Percy (1971), which is about a naked man falling and mutilating the penis of the protagonist, who has to have a penis graft.

Frédéric Fonteyne and Anne Paulicevich's’s Filles de joie | Working Girls (2020)

The English translation of this Belgian film doesn't convey the irony of the (rather old-fashioned) French title: the three women in this – Axelle (Sara Forestier), Conso (Annabelle Lengronne) and Dominique (Noémie Lvovsky), also known as Athéna, Héra and Circé in their working existences – don't exactly have a great deal of joy in their life.

Co-director and screenwriter Anne Paulicevich has researched cross-frontier prostitution, and the result is this fictional study of these three women, who drive every day from Roubaix in France to Belgium (where laws are more tolerant) to sell themselves in a brothel.

All three women live in very different circumstances: Axelle lives in an HLM, is separated from her partner Yann (Nicolas Cazalé), and has custody of their three children; Conso lives a few doors away from Axelle, is single and wants a child by her 'boyfriend' Jean-Ti (Jonas Bloquer); Dominique is older, lives with her unemployed husband and two demanding adolescents (one male, the other female) in a house in the suburbs and also works part time as a nurse.

Each woman has a burden to live with, although there's one very humorous moment in which Conso's 'boyfriend' gets his just deserts. What we have here is in a sense a revenge movie, one which will cement the already very strong bond between the girls. At the beginning of the film we see a body being buried on wasteland, and it isn't until the end of the film that we're reminded of this and see virtually the whole film as the flashback that it is. Drunk, Yann has returned, wants to take Axelle's children, and while trying to rape Axelle her mother hits him with a heavy instrument. Time for all three women to get together, for Dominique to finish Yann off by smothering him, and we're back to the beginning with the burial scene.

Some reviews have criticised the film for representing sterotypes (tarts with hearts, men being monsters, the unemployed wearing vests all the time, etc) and having mixed moods, descending into the thriller genre, and so on. On the other hand, many reviews have seen a very engaging film exploring the hidden world of prostitution and the desperation of the women: I agree with that view of this very feminist film.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

 

Chantal Akerman's 221-minute feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has many of the features I'd never seen before, many things that aren't normally seen, although the film is all the better for those features. We don't see life as it is lived because this is acting, but what we do see is usually not included in cinema because it would be considered extraneous, simply soul-destroyingly boring: for instance, eating really does take place. The paradox of Jeanne Dielman is that the normally boring bits are not only the most interesting parts, but that the normally most interesting parts hardly get a look-in.

This could be called experimental cinema, but that would demean this magnificent film, which is played by Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) with a lesser role by her son Syvain (Jan Decorte). Normally we might for instance see a cooking scene for a short time, unless included with a significant conversation, although there's hardly any conversation in this film anyway. What we see here are painfully drawn-out scenes of everyday matters, although they become the very fabric of the film itself: a slow scene of potatoes being peeled; water dripping through a coffee filter to a jug; washing and rinsing the dishes and cutlery after meals; slowly folding Sylvain's pyjamas and folding up his bed in the lounge; food actually being eaten in 'real time' along with drinks being served in real quantities, not a few centimetres as in most films; what little conversation there is taking time, etc. Jeanne has to keep doing things in order to make herself exist, or rather to give herself a semblance of existing.

Jeanne is meticulous in almost everything she does, and this is seen in the way she puts the cutlery away, dusts the ornaments in the glass-fronted cupboard, etc. In almost all respects, she appears to be a very presentable lower middle-class woman perhaps with minor bourgeois pretensions. Oh, and she places a towel on her bed to mop up sperm: Jeanne is a widow and has no wish to complicate her life with another man, but to make ends meet she has to prostitute herself during the afternoon when her son is at school.

Her relative has sent her a present from Canada, so Jeanne, on hearing the doorbell, hides it under the bed and puts the scissors she used to open it on the dressing table: now why should the viewer feel something coming? The john, to his misfortune, gives Jeanne an orgasm, probably for the first time ever in her life, and while he basks in post-coital bliss Jeanne uses the scissors on his neck. Well, she couldn't exactly admit to anyone, especially herself, that she'd enjoyed it could she? So what now, waiting for Sylvain to return from school to find a dead body on his mother's bed?

This is one of the best films ever made.

Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville | Blow up the Town (1968)

This is Chantal Akerman's first film, a 13-minute short by a woman who had very little education in film but soon learned. She was born in 1950, began making films as a result of seeing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, and killed herself in 2015 after a spell in hospital due to depression.

Akerman is the only actor in her own film. Unnamed, she enters her flat with a bunch of flowers after collecting the mail. She makes a pasta meal, washes it down with a glass of wine, empties her cupboard of kitchen tools which she leaves on the floor and then half-heartedly cleans it, seals up the door with strong adhesive tape, throws the cat onto the balcony, burns a paper, turns on the gas and boom, boom, boom! Akerman's career began and ended with a suicide.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant | The Child (1996)

The Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant is again set in a bleak Seraing, Liège, with its social problems. Essentially it's a tale of (non)-working-class woe starring twenty-year-old Bruno (Jérémie Renier) and eighteen-year-old Sonia (Déborah François). Bruno gets by on petty theft, using the young schoolboy Steve (Jérémie Ségard) as his accomplice. The couple have a four-month-old baby.

Bruno clearly hasn't grown up: he plays at putting his foot in a puddle to leave a mark on a wall by seeing how far he can jump up it, murders time by playing with a stick in the water, etc. And then he decides to secretly sell the baby, until he tells Sonia what he's done, she faints and has to be rushed to hospital: cue for Bruno to return and reclaim the baby.

All the events are played out against this bleak backdrop, the film bereft of music, actions being repeated quite a lot as if to underline the grimness: desperate phone calls, waiting, making bus journeys and so on. As in Le Fils (in which Renier also stars) any physical effort, the strains and the panting, is heard.

And then the problems begin: Steve grabs an elderly woman's handbag and they whiz off on Steve's moped, although a car follows them and they're forced to hide in the water. And then a change begins to take place when Steve is frozen and Bruno goes to great pains to rub the younger boy's feet and legs: it's almost as if Bruno is at last learning to be a father.

Bruno's transformation as a responsible human being continues when Steve is arrested and Bruno turns himself in to the police, handing in the money he's stolen. And Sonia, who had formerly rejected Bruno, goes to see him in prison and they both break down crying over the futility of it all. It's hardly an upbeat ending, but it shows a strong enough element of promise that the Dardennes like to sign their films off with.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's La Promesse | The Promise (1996)

Unsurprisingly, La Promesse is a social drama from the frères Dardenne set in Seraing, Liège. Igor (Jérémie Renier) is seventeen and works for his father Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who is exploiting immigrant workers: this is a world of usury, blackmail, theft and violence. And then, soon after the business has taken in a group of immigrants on a car carrier, African worker Amidou (Rasmané Ouédraogo) has a fatal fall and Igor promises before he dies that he will look after his wife Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her baby.

We first saw Igor looking at a customer's car and then surreptitiously robbing her, but here begins Igor's adulthood, and his moral education: the future of two individuals, both unaware that the father is dead, is in his hands. Igor, his promise made, goes out of his way to help Assita: paying for her housing, humiliating his father. We have seen here how Assita is subjected to racism by being pissed on, but Igor even sells his ring (showing his pact with his father) to help Assita, who becomes a kind of mother figure he looks after. 

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Le Fils | The Son (2002)

Le Fils has very few characters, very little language, and no soundtrack. But its austerity never makes it boring, it is always gripping, full of suspense, in fact a remarkable film by the remarkable Dardenne brothers, mainly set as ususal in Seraing, Liège, Belgium. In its spartan way, I'd even call it a psychological thriller.

Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) is a carpenter who works in a rehabilitation centre for past offenders and we are surrounded by wood, we learn about wood as Olivier's students learn about wood: they have books which tell them how to identify different kinds, and they carry fold-up measures that they carry in a slot pocket in their overalls.

And then one day Francis (Morgan Marinne) comes to join the team, although for some reason Olivier doesn't initially want to accept him as a member of his class, but agrees a little later. But his behaviour towards Francis is cold, unlike the others he doesn't name him, although he is thorough and teaches him the skills required. Nevertheless he eyes him all the time suspiciously, even 'borrows' his keys to secretly visit his flat, lie on his bed as if trying to put himself in Francis's position. It may even cross the viewer's mind that there is something sexual behind his motives, wonder in what way his bizarre actions are, if at all, linked to his separation from his wife.

Meanwhile Francis seems to be growingly attached to Olivier, following his instructions, finding out how much he knows about measurements. During a long ride in Olivier's car to collect some wood from a warehouse Olivier questions Francis about his long detention, they buy patisseries from a shop but Olivier brusquely insists that they pay separately, they go to a café where Olivier drinks a coffee and Francis a coke. The scene where they play table football in the café is in retrospect almost surreal.

At the warehouse Olivier questions Francis on the identity of a few woods, and eventually tells him that Francis is the killer of his son. The viewer has seen the build-up to this moment, realises why Olivier has been watching Francis so strangely and so intensely, realises that the man is broken, his life destroyed by the death of his child. We have watched his meticulous work with wood, we have watched his meticulous washing of his sandwich box, and now we watch as he hunts down Francis, who after learning that he killed Olivier's son runs and hides in the warehouse of wood, as if he can escape from his past.

After a chase in the warehouse, between the different woods in the warehouse, Francis runs out and is caught by Olivier, and the film captures his breathlessness, which seems to match the hopelessness. He can, and wants, to strangle Francis, but doesn't. He leaves him, but Francis returns to help him load the wood into the trailer.

Devastating. What director needs to spend millions to get people to be entranced by such dramas?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Deux jours, une nuit | Two Days, One Night (1995)

This is another gritty, realistic movie with a strong social interest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne set of course in Seraing, Belgium. Their work in many respects strongly resembles that of Ken Loach.

Here we have the married Sandra (Marion Cotillard) battling with work problems. She's a worker for a solar power panel business who's been off work with depression, during which time her boss has re-organised the work schedule, meaning that the workers have to choose between receiving a bonus and Sandra keeping her job.

Under pressure of the foreman, the workers have provisionally voted against Sandra, although Juliette (Catherine Salée) has obtained a stay of execution until a concluding vote on Monday: Sandra has just a weekend in which to muster support.

And most of the film involves Sandra trying to gather support, often in trying circumstances: amongst the definite there are the definitely against, those who are precarious financially, she even indirectly causes violence in working for her cause, but in the end she only just loses, which is strangely encouraging.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Le Gamin au vélo | The Kid with a Bike (2011)

Le Gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike) perhaps immediately calls to mind Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948), although I'm reminded far more of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist.

The film is set in a rather bleak Seraing in Belgium. Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret) is an unruly eleven- or twelve-year-old in a children's home who is desperately seeking his father. By chance Samantha (Cécile de France), a youngish hairdresser (and the modern equivalent of Mr Brownlow) begins to foster him. But after learning that his father has rejected him, Cyril soon falls into the clutches of Wes (Egon di Mateo), the Fagin-type father figure who teaches him to steal. After a rather unconvincing botched robbery in which Cyril knocks a father and son out in unintended cartoon fashion (and with which Luc Dardenne finds some similarity to Raskolnikov's actions in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), he finally recognises Samantha as a substitute mother and seems to be moving toward a kind of happiness with her.

Bearing in mind the subject matter, this could have turned dangerously sentimental but with the Dardenne brothers handling it that problem is avoided.