Beef Head (2011)

Directed by: Michaël R. Roskam | 124 minutes | drama, crime | Actors: Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeroen Perceval, Jeanne Dandoy, Barbara Sarafian, Tibo Vandenborre, Frank Lammers, Sam Louwyck, Robin Valvekens, Baudoin Wolwertz, David Murgia, Erico Salamone, Philippe Grand’Henry, Kris Cuppens, Sofie Sente, Kristof Renson

Something is wrong with Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts). The flesh of his shoulders and neck bulges unnaturally, enclosing his permanently imploded gaze like an airbag. Up close, it’s like a caged bull, a fearsome beast. ‘Rundskop’ is also an appropriate title for him. But when this Flemish meat farmer comes in from a distance, he suddenly reminds of a sad, lame donkey. Jackie’s paradoxical physique betrays his inner self. At the same time, it marks the stratification of the entire film.

‘Rundskop’ portrays Flanders as we fantasize and (at the same time) fear it is: like a farmland from which colors want to withdraw, where the curtains are always drawn, where soggy men go to whores together when they have something to celebrate, where ‘clapping’ means talking, where Walloons and Flemings do not want to understand each other, and where unsuspecting calves ‘work themselves up’ into slaughter-ripe meat heifers in ten weeks. “Can even be done in eight weeks,” explains Sam Raymond (Frank Lammers) in lilting Limburgish. At least if you inject your cows with the milky stuff he offers from his trunk. Steroids trader Raymond is just one of the shadowy figures who haunt ‘Rundskop’. Farmers and meat traders do not think in numbers, but in kilos. They don’t give their animals hay, but diethylstilbestrol or mestanolone. They don’t clap at the cattle market, but on an abandoned racetrack, at a table full of mutual distrust. And they’re bringing bullet-holed BMWs back to the garage just after someone got shot.

‘Rundskop’ was inspired by facts: in 1995 the Flemish veterinarian Karel van Noppen was murdered because he refused to take his eyes off the ‘hormone mafia’. In itself it offers more than enough material for a shadowy thriller with hypothermic wholesalers (Sam Louwyck), treacherous friends (Jeroen Perceval), innocent childhood sweethearts (Jeanne Dandoy), and detectives who scream out loud (Barbara Sarafian). But just as you’ve prepared for that as a viewer, the story sends you at full speed into a staggering flashback, to the eve of Jackie’s puberty. When Jacky Vanmarsenille, the squirting bully, the frustrated shadow boxer, still had an angelic face and a bicycle. When he and his boyfriend Diederik waved to hookers behind their windows and secretly sought out the girl he was in love with. When he was terribly beaten by a feeble-minded Waal.

Your view of a breathing muscle mass will probably never be the same after ‘Rundskop’. The film itself also transforms before your eyes from a decent crime film into a psychological drama about a man trapped in his lack. It’s great that ‘Rundskop’ doesn’t tip over, but the turn remains abrupt – as if the screenwriter, like an absent-minded professor, has let himself be distracted by a new idea and that – yep – has cycled into the original. It is one of the few bumps in what is otherwise a ‘perfect storm’. The playing by Matthias Schoenaerts (and not only his) is overwhelming, the music by Raf Keunen is compelling, and the idea that ‘Rundskop’ is only the feature film debut for director Michael R. Roskam is astonishing.