Even though established filmmakers, such as the Dardenne brothers, are the true pioneers of the Belgium social wave, Lanners, Mariage and Groeningen offset their seriousness with a dose of fine surreal humor and sharp satire



Let us imagine a film screenplay in which a group of workers, fired because their factory has gone bankrupt, steals money from the union and hires a hit man to murder their former boss. No, this is not the awakened spirit of some local admirer of Ken Loach, because our social satire is immune to such anarchic excesses. This particular screenplay is based on the relationship between France and Belgium, a few steps away from the EU’s glass fortress. This is the film Louise Michel by the French-Belgian author duo Gustave de Kervern & Benoit Delpine. Andreotti once said, “dirty laundry should be washed within our own four walls” because he was bothered by the fact that the masterpiece Rome, Open City did not show his homeland in the most beautiful light. It was one of the stupidest statements in his political career. However, Belgian filmmakers do the opposite. Authors such as Felix van Groeningen (La Merditude des choses), Lucas Belvaux (La Raison du plus faible) and Bouli Lanners (Eldorado) want to show the other side of the story. The corpulent Lanners became sort of a trademark for them. In Louise Michel he plays a timid murderer and in Eldorado a used car salesman who becomes close with a young man who broke into his apartment.

Even though established filmmakers, such as the brothers Dardenne, are the true pioneers of the Belgium social wave, Lanners, Mariage and Groeningen substitute their seriousness with a dose of fine surreal humor and sharp satire. Belgium suburbs and working-class dominate their films. Somewhere in there are two old women, Debrauwer’s Pauline and Paulette, who love kitsch, operettas and pink designs and flowers. There is also the pater familias from Mariage’s Les convoyeurs attendant who encourages his son to beat an unusual record of closing and opening doors 40 000 times in 24 hours and win a car from a sales association that uses millennial euphoria to earn more profit. The author’s nationality (Flemish or Walloon) is almost unimportant, since their themes are as universal as the language that they speak. Nevertheless, according to the Belgian filmmaker Frederic Sojcher, Belgium’s political crisis influences the two nationally different cinema traditions coexisting in the same territory. Thus, Flemish films are rarely shown on Walloon screens while Belgian films in French have negligible commercial success in the Flemish part of the country. Philippe Dutilleul ironically depicts this situation in the pseudo-documentary Bye, Bye Belgium, which plays with some of the mechanisms from Welles’ War of the Worlds with one difference – his radio announces Belgium’s secession. Flemish accents can be regarded as a sort of a version of London cockney used by Leigh’s washed out protagonists. The story about a film director (Ca rend heureux) who wants to gather a team of unemployed film workers and make a film at any cost, shows how the unemployment crisis hits all groups of people.

Olivier Masset-Dapasse’s newest film Illegal, shown at the Cannes’ Quinzaineu, belongs to the same social wave. In the manner of vaudeville, it shows the humdrum existence of Russian illegal immigrants in Bruxelles. Only the mosaic like structure of Barman’s Any Way The Wind Blows, whose title is borrowed from Frank Zappa’s famous song, is somewhat different from this social milieu and shows us the world of Antwerp’s hipsters whose seemingly unconnected destinies converge at a party on a hot summer night. Only Balthazar’s autistic Ben X is isolated from the outside world thanks to a fantasy games in which his avatar tries to seduce a beautiful princess. Even so, the gap between Ben’s virtual and Paulette’s kitschy world is very small. (Dragan Rubeša)