De helaasheid der dingen

... you can always count on tears, blood, placenta and spilt beer.

Having said this, this film uses all of them to good effect. This brutal confrontation with the Flanders of Pieter Brueghel and Jacques Brel, is not without its pathetic and touching moments. It reminded me a lot of Quebec's "C.R.A.Z.Y" in its enthusiasms for its subject but with, of course, much more squalor.

The actors are all convincing and attractive in their own way and the direction is transparent and unobtrusive. The viewer should be warned that the opus is generously peppered with scenes of fornication, sometimes public, pissing, sometimes public, defecation, sometimes public, vomiting, sometimes public, public male nudity and transvestism, not to mention lots and lots of binge drinking.

I liked the anecdote in the "making of" documentary telling how one of the father's fake moustaches was fashioned from the male actors' and crew's pubic hair. It seemed fitting somehow.

I saw this movie yesterday. I was drawn to it because it won the golden Amphora at the "Festival de Quend du film grolandais", an independent movie festival. Seeing the film poster with naked hairy guys cycling, I knew that I would have some fun but how far will they go? In fact, the movie alternates quite hilarious scenes with drunk people with more dramatic sequences. With this consideration, the movie is finally closer to English dramedies that are used to show working class characters and, finally, whatever strange they are, you feel some sympathy for those guys. It's quite comforting to see people who don't care about the others (or perhaps even about anything) but you also see that there are consequences. For sure, this movie is not about preventing the audience from drinking or about giving any lesson. Following the story of Gunther, you just follow the day to day life of a hillbilly family with its ups and downs (a little more ups in the movie). Like they say in "Les cahiers du cinema", Felix van Groeningen makes you love and care for these model people in the same manner as John Cassavetes was able to do. In a nutshell, go and see it (except if you are a feminist of course).

This is a damn good film. I think it sort of goes from being a very low-brow comedy into an interesting examination of a very dysfunctional family and how that shapes Gunther's own life as an adult. The thing about the movie is that under all the "ugliness" the Strobbes display through their behavior, the film is certainly very heartfelt and honest about how it portrays its characters. Sure they may be ugly, unlikable, drunkards, gamblers...but they feel like a real family and that's what the film gets across greatly. They do feel like a very close and tight-knit family and you get to see their ups and downs, mostly downs really, and how they relate to each other. So it's a very well-written film, it's also well-acted but there's something about the film, it's not really a flaw, but somehow the film is content with just being very good, it never feels great. There's some inspired stuff here but it's never great and I'm not sure what the reason is for that. But at least it's still a damn good film about a fascinating family.

I attended the North American Premiere of "The Misfortunates" at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Director Felix van Groeningen introduced the film with a few caveats about the drunkenness and debauchery to come. He was correct. The film is filled with humor and pathos, presenting some painfully brutal characterizations of life in Belgium for a 13-year-old boy living in a house of alcoholics. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, "The Misfortunates" can be painful to watch at times but the payoff is worth it. Shot cinema verité style, the artful use of color and texture combined with copious amounts of bawdy humor make this film an audience favorite.

I know one shouldn't mix reviews with personal experiences, but when watching this film I couldn't help but constantly remember an anecdote that happened to me one New Year's morning in Brussels: trying to cure my party hangover with some friends in a bar, we observed a guy trying to cross the street with a crate of beer. Now the streets were all frozen over and the king had advised in his New Year's address to stay at home. Plus the roads in Brussels are caved in by traffic. So the weight of the crate kept the guy sliding towards the middle of the street. He could make it to either side without, but not with the crate. Nevertheless, he kept trying for over an hour to pull, shove or otherwise move the crate from where it was stuck - until he found the ingenious solution: He drank six bottles of beer on the spot, thereby sufficiently reducing the weight to pull the crate over - only that he got so drunk and spaced out in the process that he slipped and broke all of the bottles, so his whole effort came to naught.

This little story has nothing and everything to do with 'Misfortunates' which is chock full of incidents like this one. And as abundant films about losers and social misfits may be in Belgian/ Dutch cinema (like Aaltra, The Sexual Life of Belgians, Flodders, Spetters), this one takes the cake in every respect: the autobiographical story is perfectly adapted and wonderfully played. Its provides tons of utterly irrelevant, but amusing add-ons like when the Strubbes invite themselves over to an exiled Iranian couple to force them into watching a Roy Orbison concert because their TV's been repossessed. Like in my little story, one cannot help but somewhat admire the persistence of the Strubbe family to make their lives as dysfunctional as humanly possible, while one cannot ignore the destructiveness of it all.

If you like painfully real social dramedy, this one is for you; if your threshold for witnessing the lower recesses of human behavior isn't very high, you're likely to find 'Misfortunates' an extremely tasteless affair.