Les Géants (2011)

Directed by: Bouli Lanners | 84 minutes | drama | Actors: Paul Bartel, Zacharie Chasseriaud, Marthe Keller, Karim Leklou, Martin Nissen

The coming-of-age story by Bouli Lanners, ‘Les Géants’, is at times incredibly beautiful in image and sound, which, especially through his own voice, becomes more than the sum of its parts. The story offers many possibilities: three teenagers more or less abandoned by their parents spend a summer in Wallonia and Luxembourg. Lanners, who is also a screenwriter, knows how to give the three each their own refined character, thus distinguishing the characters by the stereotypes with which they see themselves.

It is partly the film of cinematographer Jean-Paul de Zaetijd, who previously worked with Lanners on the films ‘Eldorado’ and ‘Ultranova’. He knows how to beautifully portray the grasses and forests of Wallonia and Luxembourg, although his camera work is occasionally too static. The images are often beautiful, but the camera moves too little in the beginning, which creates a distance that is not desirable. The images are like paintings; It is not without reason that Lanners was a painter in Belgium before his breakthrough as an actor/director/writer.

When the drug dealer Boeuf makes his appearance in ‘Les Géants’, you expect a change, a plot twist, but Lanners lets his film flow like slow water; no momentum comes unexpectedly, and throughout the film the emphasis remains on the visual splendor, paired with beautiful music by The Bony King of Nowhere; a hidden gem. What lingers is the memory of wavy grass under poetic guitar tones. Dialogues are few, and hardly clarify anything. Acting performances are sincere and realistic, so there seems to be almost no acting. The plot is slow, as the whole movie seems slow. But above all, the stamp of director Bouli Lanners is omnipresent; every second of film expresses his painterly soul. A proof of the splendor of Belgian cinema, and the fact that we can still learn a lot from our southern neighbors in the field of film.