Eldorado (2008) - film review

Yvan is a forty-something loner who buys and sells vintage cars.  When a younger man, Elie, breaks into his house, Yvan has a good excuse to fly off the handle.  He doesn’t.  Instead, he takes an immediate liking to the stranger and offers to take him to his parents in his old Chevrolet.  A strange friendship develops between the two men who are different in so many ways...

Having made a promising directorial debut with his distinctive social drama Ultranova (2005), Bouli Lanners takes us on another walk on the wild side, Belgian style, in a film that is every bit as quirky and indefinable as his first.  Part road-movie, part buddy-movie (but quite unlike any film you will have seen in either of these genres), Eldorado depicts the uncomfortable friendship that develops between a middle-aged loner (played by Lanners, a more than capable screen actor) and a young drifter.

Both of the two leading protagonists look as if they have no idea where their lives are heading; their chance meeting seems to give them both a sense of direction, at least temporarily.  As they traverse the oddly forbidding Belgian countryside, ostensibly to visit the younger man’s parents, they encounter all manner of bizarre individuals, including a shopkeeper who lets his customers take what they want without paying, a sicko who wants to get rid of his dog and a nude caravan owner who casually introduces himself as Alain Delon.  No, I am not making this up.

Eldorado is unusual enough (and short enough) to make it an easy watch.  Anyone who has ever subjected himself to Rémy Belvaux’s C’est arrivé près de chez vous (1992) will know that Belgian humour is quite unlike that of any other nation on Earth.  It’s not the kind of humour that’s intended to make you laugh.  Rather, it’s the kind that compels you to back away slowly and quietly to the nearest phone box where you hastily call for reinforcements from the nearest lunatic asylum.  The film will easily hold your attention but once the end credits start rolling you wonder what on Earth it was all meant to be about.  Is this supposed to be a metaphor for life - an accumulation of bizarre random experiences that ultimately adds up to nothing? 

Whatever its premise, there is much to like about this eccentric little film - its wry humour, which slips into dark surrealist comedy at the least provocation; its sympathetic but ever-so-slightly scary principal characters, who say far more with their eyes and body gestures than with their mouths (a typically Belgian trait); and the erratic switching between static and moving camera shots, which adds to the growing sense that we are being projected further and faster into a crumbling inner world.

The abrupt downbeat ending looks as if it could have been dreamed up by Albert Camus on a particularly grim day, since it shrieks with the absurdity and pointlessness of existence.  A man buries a friendship by burying a dog.  Is there a deep and subtle meaning to this?  Or is Bouli Lanners merely in the employ of the Belgian tourist board, hired to persuade us that his country is a far more weird place than we had ever dared to imagine?  Eldorado is a film that is simply too off-the-wall to dislike with any real passion, but it probably makes much more sense if you have an advanced degree in French existentialist philosophy, know something about Belgian culture, or like dogs.

© James Travers 2010

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