The Academy Awards this year will take place on the 2nd of March which leaves me with two more weeks to bring to your attention some of the lesser known but nonetheless quite brilliant foreign language films that have been nominated in that category. This year there are five, but in the interest of space, I will not list them all.
One of these five films is a Belgian melodrama that centers around the love affair between a bearded bluegrass musician (yes, bluegrass in Belgium) and a stunning free spirited tattoo artist who eventually joins the band as their lead singer.
The film’s structure jumps back and forth in time, showing us how Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and Elise (Veerle Baetens) first meet at her tattoo parlour. He invites her to his show later that week, and thus begins a beautiful but doomed love affair that lasts seven years and leaves pretty much everyone in the film heartbroken.
Differing from most melodramas, in The Broken Circle Breakdown it is not just the love affair that disintegrates, leaving everyone bereft. Rather, through the flashback narrative, we learn of the tenderness in Didier and Elise’s relationship, their humour when they deal with each other, and their obvious connection. Tragically, it is the birth and death of their six-year old daughter Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) from cancer that irrevocably shatters this couple’s relationship and the portrayal of that disintegration is one of this film’s strengths.
For the most part, melodrama is unbearable to me, hence my hesitance to sit through the majority of the three-hour prolonged Bollywood confections. However, when a story is so strongly anchored with believable character, real anguish, and, I must add, however skeptical you might be, truly great bluegrass music, it is hard not to continue watching despite one’s growing realisation that one’s own heart might break a little along with those of the characters’.
The Broken Circle Breakdown – named after a famous bluegrass song titled Will the Circle Be Unbroken- is an unexpected but beautiful hybrid of a film out of Belgium, refreshing in its willingness to take on an overly familiar subject but addressing it with sincerity and real skill, both in its directing as well as in the acting.
Felix Van Groeningen’s film (which he also co-wrote) may not win the Foreign Language Oscar this year. There is another rather obvious front runner- Italian Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty), which I will review next week, but regardless of this if you have a chance and the inclination, pick up the film and watch it for a few hours of great bittersweet cinema.
watch trailer: