Cinema
Man Bites Dog ('18', selected cinemas) Soft Top Hard Shoulder ('15', selected cinemas)
Murder most dull
Vanessa Letts
The person sitting behind me in the new film from Belgium, Man Bites Dog, spent the entire performance laughing. The effect was similar to hearing a scratch on a record-player repeating itself over and over again. Scenes of nasty violence in the film neither shocked nor dismayed him. He was certainly never (as the critics claim we are meant to be) unnerved by his own enjoy- ment. The whole thing was simply a good laugh from beginning to end. When a woman nearby leant over and told him to shut up he thought for a moment and replied, 'Don't wind me up, all right?'
Man Bites Dog is a macabre send-up of the cinema Write style of documentary. It is filmed all through in black and white and opens with a grainy shot of its subject, Ben the psychopathic killer, biting into the air and smothering his latest victim to death, as far as we can tell, in a kind of embrace. Benoit Poelvoorde, who plays Ben, has a tragi-comic mien, a broken nose like a cliff face and a certain amount of sinister charm; he captures neatly Ben's subtle changes in mood, from exhilaration after he has killed someone to sudden gloom when he loses in a childish drinking game. Early on in the film Ben describes matter- of-factly how he ballasts his corpses to a ratio of four times the body weight. 'For old people, multiply by five,' he adds flip- pantly. 'Old bones are porous.' He hurls the body-bag into a river and it lands, ridiculously, above the water on a weir. In between various increasingly hideous killings (a man has his head smashed against some taps, an old woman is fright- ened to death, a child is hunted down in the woods) we get Ben's views on topics as diverse as social welfare policies and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Horta. The oddest people, it seems, can be psychos. This conceit is funny at first, but over an hour and a half the joke becomes laboured. Boredom soon inures one to the impact of the various frights and shocks. The slaughters get more and more lurid and sickening, but are never really painful.
A documentary film crew scurries after Ben, egging him on. The film is supposed to show how they are gradually sucked in
to his criminal activities (hint: voyeurism), but as it starts point-blank with a murder they're well in there from the outset. Ben buys the crew lunches in restaurants and pink gins in bars, and in no time at all the director and the soundman are helping him out with corpse disposal.
The crunch comes, however, when, in one particularly gruesome scene, the whole crew participates in a gang rape organised by Ben while a husband is held at gunpoint. But even after this, as the laughing man behind me proved, Man Bites Dog is never seriously discomfiting. The film-makers are more interested in creating a faux-naif style than anything else. An atmosphere of titil- lating, high camp comedy is carefully main- tained, so that in the end the sheer kitsch of the characters and settings prevents a real-life audience from ever having to feel genuinely implicated. The one person who might learn something from Man Bites Dog is Kenneth Branagh who, after his recent pathetic attempts to portray an alcoholic in Peter's Friends, ought to study in depth Poelvoorde's excellent drunken stupor scene. For anyone else, the film's appeal is limited. Watching it, the Belgians them- selves might conclude that they would be better off as a nation forgetting about the movie business and sticking to making chocolate truffles.
Unfortunately, the only way to be sure of enjoying Soft Top Hard Shoulder is to go and see Man Bites Dog first. It is a pity to have to criticise a home-made film, but this New British Road Movie leaves a lot to be desired. Its tone of dry cynicism comes across as curiously patchy. Its humour too is wavering and inconsistent, as if everyone involved in the film had been asked to con- tribute every joke they could think of to the script. Its plot is thin. The cameo perfor- mances by Frances Barber and Simon Cal- low are terrible. It isn't so boring that you actually want to walk out of the cinema, but a sudden projector breakdown in the middle wouldn't cause you severe with- drawal symptoms either.
Peter Capaldi, Soft Top Hard Shoulder's star, wanders around saying to himself, 'Gavin Bellini, you're a god'. It turns out Capaldi is the man responsible for writing the film in the first place. He casts himself as rather a tedious individual who has to drive from London to Glasgow in a K-reg Triumph to claim his inheritance. On the M1 he picks up an equally unappealing hitch-hiker, played by his wife Elaine Collins. They get on predictably badly through one little episode after another, and five minutes before the end of the film he dumps her. This is a nice touch, cocking a snook at the cinematic cliché that dictates that characters in these sorts of circum- stances must fall in love. Then blow me if three minutes before the end of the film he doesn't rush off and find her again. They fall in love at once, and there you are: time to go home to the washing-up and scream- ing children.
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