Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

I rarely allow myself to get worked up. But sometimes…

Matt had told me earlier about his friend Justin in CBS’s pathetic excuse for entertainment, Big Brother. Suddenly, Justin became a ‘friend of a friend.’ I find out why—Justin got the boot after threatening some girl with a knife. From there, we get into the subject of the so-called ‘reality’ shows that have invaded television like a Jerry Garcia acid trip gone bad, bad, baaaaad, man.

“No way!” I tell Matt. “D’you really think you can point a camera at someone with their knowledge and expect them not to alter their behavior? The camera changes people, makes them perform for whoever might be watching.”

Matt thinks I’m questioning the reality of the situations that crop up on these shows. He murmurs about Jerry Springer, revealing in confessional mode that he watches it sometimes—I guess his ‘sometimes’ might be an understatement. A literate musician friend in college also tuned in to Springer, claiming that he watches for its psychology. Uh huh. And I leave my bookshelves and surf porn sites for the world-class literature.

“Of course that shit’s real—I don’t doubt that! But these guests and contestants come to the show knowing that viewers expect something crazy, and those amoral TV execs have them convinced that it’s all right to let go, let the real them shine out. I can’t say if they’ll overact or underact their parts—but they won’t act as they normally would!

You think the stations would run anything really real, meaning—normal? Would they follow you home and broadcast you scratching your butt, highlighting journal papers, cooking pasta, and wanking off? Oh wait, that last bit could work… hmmm… call up FOX Family. You might get some opposition from Patty Robertson unless you can confidently forecast greenbacks rolling in.”

Mulling over the conversation later while ruminating on my Ryvita, I realized I had the perfect movie for Matt, in which a camera crew follows a smalltime lowlife in his hijinks around town in a morbid version of reality TV. So come Monday evening—the time of the week, come hell or homework, we’d institutionalized into rental night—I march into Blockbuster’s foreign film aisle and with a practiced palm pluck C’est Arrivé Prèz de Chez Vous, incomprehensibly translated to Man Bites Dog (MBD), from the stacks. It doesn’t take long after popping it in for Matt to ask, “What the hell are we watching?”

The gritty black and white scenes start rolling innocuously with a train ride that turns terminally memorable for an unsuspecting passenger, courtesy of Benoit. After the title screen, Ben dispels any lingering doubts that the film is a tar-black comedy. Bundling up a corpse, he lectures on preparing corpses so they sink and stay underwater—remember this, there’ll be a pop quiz: children with lighter bones need more ballast—while viewers realize that a group is filming him. Cut.

Family scene at the store run by Ben’s grandparents and mother. After he explains that the crew is doing a feature on him, his mother proudly recounts Ben’s model childhood. Cut.

Ben loiters in the street in his mailman uniform—that’s how he gets his elderly victims to open their doors to him. Two kids play with toy guns near him. He starts another speech to the camera as one of the kids pretends to shoot him and runs away. Ben gets the toy gun from the remaining kid, aims it at him and turns to smile at the camera. Jump cuts to scenes of Ben sighting at and shooting people, dragging bodies across the cobbles, dumping more properly ballasted bodies from the bridge.

And so on.

Viewers never learn why the film crew decided to feature Ben and his trade. They see rough footage with some scenes that the documentary team spliced in. They film as their cash flow allows, working with Ben’s availability. Why viewers don’t see the final cut gets revealed at the end.

So MBD plays as a documentary in which its creators didn’t get to the final editing phase. But thoughts of a laissez faire cinema verité type directorial input are quelled by the dawning realization that the seeming randomness of the footage filmed is carefully calculated to perturb viewers and keep them from settling down. Scenes rotate from the violent and/or disturbing to those of Ben ranting or being stupid to cheery, homey ones among family and friends. Kill, play music, maim, drunken revelry, dump bodies, discuss art, rob, birthday party, do away some more old folks… Matt commented, “what the fuck?”

Matt vacillated between expressing disgust and admiration for Ben while MBD ran. Used to traditional movies, he also seemed uncomfortable with the lack of discernible plot development. I enjoyed the film as slices from Ben’s unorthodox days. Life doesn’t have a plot, it just happens. In fact, I felt the film’s impact becomes diluted approaching the end when it tries to cobble together flimsy events to hobble to an ending that wobbles on somewhat shaky plot elements.

The Belgian directing/writing team throws in a number of sophisticated jokes making fun of the sophomoric documentary team, and turns the jokes on themselves by casting themselves under their own names. Benoît Poelvoorde plays Ben, while Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel play the reporter Remy and cameraman Andre.

Ben claims that he can move his ears independently, and demonstrates with his right ear, then says he’ll do the same with his left ear, but the camera can’t capture that since Ben’s in profile. Once, while the boom operator is away from the group, viewers see Ben blabbing as always to the others, but only start to hear his voice as the soundman approaches the group. Remy’s absolutely hilarious pair of reaction takes to events in the documentary bring to mind similar regular occurrences in The Real World, but after Remy’s morbid panting versions, viewers will never look at the MTV wannabes in the same way.

The beauty of casting the story, as it stands, in a documentary format is that anything goes—clumsy camera angles, principal characters getting partially cropped in scenes, sloppy zooms, garish lighting. The actors can slur their lines, can scowl and squint or even avoid the camera… no problem! Perusing the cast list at the Internet Movie Database (us.imdb.com), it seems the collaborators pulled in people they knew for many of the roles. There’s nothing remarkable about the supporting cast’s performance except the fact that there’s nothing remarkable about their performance. Everyone from the child cringing at his mother’s knee to the aged patient with his scatological song seems natural.

Of the documentary team, viewers hardly ever see the cameraman Andre, but do catch glimpses of the various soundmen and the reporter, Remy. These actors portray a docile bunch of pushovers for Ben to shove around.

Benoît Poelvoorde shines, easily portraying the varying moods of Ben the pseudo-sophisticated serial slayer. His Ben is charismatic, always aware of and performing for the camera, occasionally peeking to make sure the camera follows him. Ben projects a continually unsettling clash of culture and crassness, intelligence and ignorance. After disgusting viewers to the core, he starts playing the piano. He spews xenophobic and homophobic rhetoric. He rants at length about urban architecture in a take, and bops off old ladies in others.

Innately creative, he experiments with new methods of killing and even introduces innovations in filming death in a shot, while simultaneously bashing Philippe Noiret. This creativity bubbles over when he stops in the middle of a celebratory meal or even during a manhunt to spout poetry. Viewers never come to like this low budget Hannibal Lecter, this killer with cracks in his veneer of education, but Ben as a one-man show nearly makes up for the lack of a plot.

In spite of the aimless plot, the filmmakers convey several points about the public’s endless fascination with peeping Tom reality shows. After one of the running gunfights in the film, it turns out in a moment of sublime hilarity that the miscreant Ben shot also had a camera crew with him. We know Ben’s bullet gave the Sicilian a one-way ticket to the beyond. It doesn’t seem likely, but the question has to be asked: would the two have acted differently without cameras at their backs? For just a revealing moment, we wonder about the complicity of the hungering mass-mind that demands a glimpse into the lives of serial killers. Ben just does what comes to Ben naturally. But does the public really need to know how a serial killer conducts business?

And more importantly, is the camera merely recording the actions, or spurring them on? A sense of surrealist irony pervades viewers as unruffled notes from a flute accompanies the refrain scene of more ballasted bodies dumped off the bridge. Are all of Ben’s grisly acts purely products of his sick mind, or is he merely feeding society’s appetite for brutality?

The average Hollywood production bludgeons viewers with its morals with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the scrotum. Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia points out the blurred line separating a criminal from a normal citizen by blatantly placing a gun, the one prop Tinseltown knows its audience grasps, into the good guy’s hands. Ah, quelle horreur! The Belgian team gets this point across gracefully in a scene that uses a video camera as an accessory to murder.

The insidious gradual entanglement of the documentary team in Ben’s affairs forms MBD’s backbone. It starts with them accepting, on camera, stashed money Ben uncovers during a raid. The crew occasionally helps Ben—once they have to drag the corpse of a black guard because Ben won’t touch it—“SIDA, Remy, SIDA” he explains before uttering an outrageously ignorant line about Africans and green monkeys.

The symbiotic relationship between the documenters and the documented develops to the point that Ben can review footage of an assault where the victim escaped, cock a glaring bespectacled eye at the crew and declare straight-facedly that they could’ve helped—they’re a team. By the end, the documentary team’s involvement becomes complete, thus allegorically implicating the society lusting after violence for entertainment as accomplices to the destructive actions perpetrated by those of Ben’s ilk.

One of the vital scenes delivering the film’s message is robbed by censoring in the US version: it completely skips over a rape scene where the film crew becomes involved. The editing in the version of MBD available at Blockbuster leaves some points hanging. In one scene, Ben irritably laments three pointlessness deaths in an upper-class district when only two deaths have been screened. The European version features the couple’s child being killed.

liffey (01/12/00), who calls this the Spinal Tap of serial-killer films, saw the version with the rape, and thought it too much. After I first read about the snipped scene at IMDb, I felt that even if I could understand intellectually why it ran on the film, I’d still feel queasy… and perhaps that is the intent.

tetsuo (03/11/00) feels that comedy shouldn’t have been used in a film so brutally honest. I have to disagree with that assessment—I feel the moments of comedy enhances the film since viewers eventually get hit by the sobering thought that they’ve been laughing along at scenes of disturbing violence, which describes exactly beautifuloser’s (05/14/00) reaction. Be sure to read gooodmann’s (08/06/00) defense and explanation of the role of humor in the film.

And while he found the message delivery slightly heavy-handed, mike_bracken (08/28/00) feels this film offers more when viewers add up all the elements that the filmmakers worked so hard to create.

Well, not always.

So Matt, buddy, I’m proud that you stayed awake through MBD and read the subtitles despite being an acknowledged slow reader, even though you didn’t enjoy the movie very much. You may cuss up a storm, kiddo, but that ain’t gonna blunt the full force of your Jesuit upbringing.

So who would enjoy this jet black comedy? Sunday school champions will feel like they’re on a wild roller coaster ride right after lunchtime, and are advised to give this one a miss. If you went through all of Natural Born Killers without puking, if your idea of an ABC book is Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, if your ears drink up Leonard Cohen’s gore-dark lyrics like fine wine, if you smile at the end of the Manic Street Preacher’s Miss Europa Disco Dancer, then this one’s for you, you sick perverted bastard!

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beautifuloser
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-32E2-9FC9163-391E600C-prod3
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mike_bracken
http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-79B9-31DDB4C4-39AA9895-prod5

t-edication

This one goes out to TI. Happy birthday, you sick perverted bastard!

t-mark

I don’t think I’ll be trying too many movie reviews. For one thing, I don’t get to watch all that many movies. But now and then, I’ll see something that seems enough off the beaten track to write about. Please let me know how I’m doing.

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08.03.01, 08.07-8, 08.17, 09.07, 09.14-7, 09.19-21, 09.23
Original version
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Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age