Looking back, or stuck in the past

This is a Festival review of Bullhead (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 September

This is a Festival review of Bullhead (2011)

For my money, Bullhead (2011), which I have just seen, should have made no more than 90 minutes, not two hours. As is not unusual (and has been a preoccupation of a representative number of films that I have seen - or maybe I was drawn to that sort of film and so chose to see them), characters look back to the past.

Here, something shockingly brutal admittedly happened to Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts) twenty years before we start, but, in and of itself, it did not appear to be what leads to his becoming the title character (which is how - very late on in the film, and when it is already obvious - he is described).

Now, various things (which may have been there in the original script) could be down to editing, but the prompt for his strand of action (and for individual actions of at least two other characters), other than meeting someone from the past, did not seem clear. (Here, as in White White World, we then just have to believe that somehow people's paths, although they live in fairly small communities, have not crossed in a very long period of years - and we then nearly end up with the absurdities of some plays by Ibsen, where an earlier (supposedly secret) event almost could not possibly have been known about either when it happened or in the intervening time.)

Be that as it may, and perhaps here as well I wasn't concentrating well when it was after eleven at night, but there is just too much else that did not seem to work. At a simple level, very little leeway appeared allowed for being able to follow and recognize again who the various parties in the competing factions were (unless I was just too tired to do so). Something is to be taken as a souvenir from a covert visit (somehow not seen by CCTV) to a hospital room, but, unless it relates to Lucia, I do not know what it was, or why she would ever be impressed by what Jacky chooses to become (although she does seek him out and then not act on having done so in the most obvious way until much later).

By contrast with me, both characters seemed blessed with abilities to recognize people whom they had seen in childhood, and for playing the detective. The real detectives. though, did not think that, if a mobile-phone could be used to track someone, it might as well also be used to eavesdrop directly, and seem able just to choose to abandon what appeared to be the main strand of action (of which, as we go with them, no more) and follow Jacky's.

It is fine that it turns out to be a red herring, and that the task that I found difficult of keeping track of who was who and what they were doing was therefore not hugely necessary, but I am brought back to whether the whole enterprise would not benefit from being more compact: the Festival's opening film arguably needed the allotted time to run its course, but I simply do not believe that this one did.


That said, the fact that Belgium is divided by a 'language barrier' (and so French is not a natural mode of expression for Jacky) was very evident, and even alluded to in connection with where he lives: for example, it makes him seem alien that he calls someone a negro, when the French speakers (as he is told) would not use that word, and there was a lot of abuse and even hatred in the way that the speakers of each languages referred to speakers of the other in derogatory racial terms.