Movie: The Broken Circle Breakdown (Felix van Groeningen, 2012)
The Broken Circle Breakdown is in the first place a superior melodrama. It tells the story of Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, who wrote the play the film is based on) who fall madly for each other through their shared passion of bluegrass music, the American Dream, and the ideas of freedom and opportunity associated with all that. They get to live their dream on a Belgian farm they've built themselves, where they make passionate love to each other, grow their own deliciously fresh food, and make a modest living singing joyous bluegrass covers together with their raggedy group of string musicians. Life only becomes better when they get a daughter, but tragedy strikes when little Maybelle dies of leukemia and Didier and Elise struggle to make their love and their music survive their grief. Van Groeningen tells this story completely non-chronologically. He constantly cuts between different periods of their lives and even the storylines within each of these periods flash back and forward without much regard for linear time. Van Groeningen doesn't always manage to keep full control over this structure, and there are certain scenes and moments whose placement in the film doesn't always make sense. That's OK though, because van Groeniingen is above all interested in conveying the passionate intensity of his characters, their love for the life they are having and the hurt caused by the breakdown of that life.
Van Groeningen achieves much of this by giving Heldenbergh and Baetens full permission to shine, getting two incredibly committed unrestrained performances without a hint of irony. The film wants to show that Elise and Didier had, and lost, the greatest possible life they could've had. It wouldn't have been able to do that if Heldenbergh and Baetens had even a hint of hesitation or disbelief in their performances. They make you believe that what seems like cowboy cosplay is Paradise for them. In doing so, they also help turn the film into something much more than a good melodrama. This is one of the best films I've ever seen about how Europeans look towards America, and American culture.
Belgium and Netherlands are small highly industrialised and urbanised countries. While Belgium has a bit more diverse landscapes, most of ordinary life still takes place in and around offices, supermarkets, commercial properties, universities, bars and clubs, modern infrastructure, new technologies, and all the other amenities we have come to associate with contemporary urban society. Succesful/ordinary citizens are expected to be able to navigate these spaces, and most stories about life in the Benelux are implicitly or explicitly about how they do so. For these reasons, outside of the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands are probably the two countries in Europe most susceptible to romantisicm about America, its promises of escape, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom on your own individual terms, outside of a society organised by mainstream political and commercial forces. The Broken Circle Breakdown imagines how it would be for Belgians to be able to live this life without needing to escape their country. Van Groeningen fully immerses you in Didier and Elise's life in their Belgian 'outback' with great attention for detail, from the way his heroes build and design their house, to the way they produce food, and from how they make love to how they take care of their kid, make money and entertain themselves. There is even a wonderful scene where we see Heldenbergh and Baetens get married with the role of priest being performed by a bluegrass bandmate who drawls their vows in a performative Texan accent. It's not clear whether their marriage is legal for the Belgian administrative state, but what matters is that it is accepted by Didier and Elise and by their community.
In this context, Maybelle's illness is about more than just the loss of their healthy daughter, it's about the loss of independence from the Belgian mass society. Didier and Elise are visibly annoyed at having to cede control to doctors and scenes that take place in public roads, hospitals, and city squares have much less clarity in their images, are slightly quicker edited, and less sharply/warmly photographed. These become quite sterile, unnnatural places and the transitions to them always feel a little jarring, most notably when after hearing so many traditional bluegrass songs we suddenly cut to the children's ward at the hospital where the theme song of Mega Mindy (a popular show produced by the famous Studio 100, a giant media conglomerate that has had an immesaurable influence on children's/family entertainment in Belgium and The Netherlands) is blasting from the speakers. It's also notable that while Elise and DIdier have to travel a lot between town and country, we only see them when they depart or arrive, never in transit. We never see how the landscape changes or a visible connection being made between farm life and city life. They are two separate 'realms' not connected by any cultural/societal conditions, but by natural ones. The weather is what binds our heroes most to their countrymen in Antwerp and Ghent. When they talk about being Belgians, they almost always talk about it in relation to the rain and cold.
Now, if you thought being a strong character-driven melodrama with great music and an original view of national/cultural identity isn't enough, the film has another layer up its sleeve. We see George W. Bush twice give a speech on tv, the first time declaring the war on terror, the second time praising the approval of a bill that blocks further stem cell research that could help patients like Maybelle. We don't see Bush pretending to be a cowboy, or giving some anti-government speech selling individual liberty and personal responsibility, but the film knows that the promise of Didier and Elise's dream life is perhaps the central idea behind American conservatism and that this has shaped so much of country/bluegrass music/culture. This shapes much of the conflict in the final third of the film, and though sometimes it can feel it's laid on too thick, it's worth seeing the big political proclamations not as blunt didacticism, but as expressions of great personal confusion. It can be quite startling to find that what 'we' love and hate (about America) is so closely connected to each other, or, even, comes from the exact same place.
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