The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)

Directed by: Felix Van Groeningen | 110 minutes | drama | Actors: Veerle Baetens, Johan Heldenbergh, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg, Nils De Caster, Robbie Cleiren, Bert Huysentruyt, Jan Bijvoet, Blanka Heirman

In all respects, ‘The Broken Circle Breakdown’ by Flemish director Felix van Groeningen is a moving and compelling film about love and death. The screenplay written by van Groeningen is a successful cinematic adaptation of the original play written by its lead actor, actor Johan Heldenbergh. From a family tragedy that touches the viewer’s heart directly, we dive back to the dazzling (driven by Bluegrass music) beginnings of their passionate relationship.

The gracefully – from head to toe – tattooed blond Elise (a demanding role in which the charismatic Veerle Baetens is completely convincing) falls like a rock for singer/banjo player/handyman Didier (Johan Heldenbergh). She seems a touching cliche of a pin-up when she’s dressed in a Stars and Stripes bikini and crawls over the red hood to the – longing – singer. And you see Didier rejoice. In the background we see his house that is not yet completely habitable.

As a bluegrass performer and dreamer, Didier (snow-white suit, beard, big cowboy hat) is obsessed with America: “America, wherever you come from, you can start again, it’s a land of dreamers,” he tells his love. It could so easily go wrong and degenerate into dead clichés and kitsch, if only something faltered in the craftsmanship of the makers of this film. That would be the case if, in a Bluegrass setting (happy strumming, a fiery violin; just woods and strings, and no drums! Plus a pretty girl singing country with her sweetheart and the band) only to the appearance to limit. But that is not the case.

The structure of the film is partly supported by an effective editing that condenses the moods and individuality of the characters. The drama of two lovers who lose their child is by definition not the simplest thing. Van Groeningen is in both hearts when he depicts their experiences and memories. Their approximately five-year-old daughter Maybelle feels lonely and intense when she wants to bury the bird that just flew to death against a glass roof that her daddy, the Americanophile, had designed as a shelter for a porch. His idea that a gray life-size sticker of a bird of prey that he has just stuck on the glass would warn other birds about the glass, is razed to the ground by Elise. In her anger and grief follow her accusations of having an undiscovered reason to accept the loss.

When Didier watches the news, this reveals itself differently. And this too is an interesting find. Van Groeningen put television archive footage in his film, in which – after the attack on the World Trade Center – the face of the war, President George Bush, rejects stem cell therapy ‘out of respect for every unique human life’. A method that could have saved their child. ‘And that’s only because of that shit religion’, an enraged Didier says. The energy and truthfulness that Veerle Baetens and Johan Heldenbergh give in their acting and music gives you goosebumps.