Felix Van Groeningen
Broken Circle Breakdown
Words By Avalon Lyndon
Here’s a formula for guaranteed tears: take a relationship and stretch it to breaking point. Add an unreasonably cute child, lying sick in a hospital bed. Hike up the tension with some Blue Valentine-style narrative fragmentation, and well… you can guess the rest. Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown handles a difficult topic
with sensitivity and realism. It’ll break your heart. At the centre of Broken Circle is a couple – free-spirited Elise (Veerle Baetens) and grounded Didier (Johan Heldenbergh). They’re deeply passionate about the things they love – tattoos, music, sex – and deeply in love with each other. When their little daughter, Maybelle, falls unexpectedly and tragically ill, both attempt to make sense of it in their own ways. But like the drip-drip-drip of water on rock, misery slowly wears down what once seemed indestructible. Set against a backdrop of
Belgian farmland, Van Groeningen’s film lodges itself within a small pocket of Flemish bluegrass fanatics. (To say it’s niche would be an understatement.) While it’s initially difficult to get past the sound of Belgian farmers singing in Alabaman accents, once your ears have acclimatised to the rogue Appalachian vowels, the music begins to speak for itself. A series of
performances throughout the film chart the couple’s increasing alienation. The last is hard to watch. As Ciafrance did so well in Blue Valentine, Broken Circle contrasts the childish fun and whimsy of the couple’s earlier scenes with the future we know lies ahead. When Elise, dressed up to the nines in a starsand-stripes bikini, slinks her way to Didier across a truck bonnet,
we have a sense of being completely in-the-moment, wrapped up in the temptation and optimism of the early days. Didier is crazy about America, and his heart lies in the Deep South. The events of September 11 serve as a tipping point for Didier’s relationship with America, and with Elise. Hope and idealism is replaced by paranoia, aggression and recklessness of the era;
the US is more George Bush than Johnny Cash, and Didier begins to question himself and the culture he has loved for so long. The American dream dies as Elise and Didier begin to lose each other. Terminal illness in children is an area ripe for sentimentalism, but Van Groeningen swerves deftly past it. Thanks in large part to young Nell Cattrysse’s precociously nuanced
performance, Broken Circle broaches the topic with a perfect balance of compassion and level-headedness. However, the stand-out performance undoubtedly comes from Veerle Baetens in the role of Elise. She is a girl who literally wears her heart on her sleeve; covered in tattoos, her skin is a record of all her past loves. By the end of the film, the only glimpse we see of the old Elise is in her tattoos, and even they are ever-changing.
What Broken Circle manages is no mean feat – making Flemish bluegrass cowboys relevant to UK audiences must be a tricky task. What makes their story so powerful is that it taps into one of our most primal fears: losing a person that you love. However, for such a heart wrenching melodrama, it’s surprisingly uplifting and entertaining, with a few moments of levity thrown into the darkness. With its mish-mash of times and cultures, Broken Circle offers something unique which is well worth the price of your cinema ticket. Just maybe stop by Boots for some tissues first.