Bullhead
Rundskop
Michaël R Roskam (2011)
Some of the humour and the conflicts between the characters in the Belgian writer-director Michaël R Roskam’s first feature depend on an understanding that I don’t have of the cultural differences between the Dutch- and French-speaking communities of Belgium and, I guess, on a national joke that the Flemish are unsophisticated beside the Walloons. There’s a mixture of languages in evidence: French, Dutch, the Limburg dialect and occasionally English (especially ‘fuck’). I never quite got the hang of the criminal activities which propel Bullhead. Put simply: ‘young Limburg cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille is approached by an unscrupulous veterinarian to make a shady deal with a notorious West-Flemish beef trader’ (IMDB); injecting cattle illegally with growth hormones is central to the story; and the murder of the senior policeman trying to stamp out the practice among the farmers of Flanders is an important plot catalyst.
The playing of a woman police officer and of the various shady dealers is energetic but pretty broad: the vividly disreputable faces of the dealers can make the actors seem like animated mug shots. The experience of watching Bullhead (which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) is very different from how you feel it ought to be. In theory, the cartoonish aspect of the crime story is a bridge to the crunching violence for which Jacky Vanmarsenille is responsible and his colossal bulk is all of a piece with those elements. On paper, Jacky’s biography sounds garishly contrived (even though, according to Calum Grant, it’s based on a newspaper article[1]). As a ten-year-old, he was on the receiving end of a vicious attack by an older boy. This left Jacky’s testicles crushed and useless. The doctor prescribed compensatory testosterone. Twenty years later, Jacky is still injecting not only his cattle but himself with male hormones. They fill a fridge in his room. The coarse comedy and the tribal wit of Bullhead don’t mesh with Jacky’s story; but that story, thanks to Matthias Schoenaerts, is powerfully affecting.
Schoenaerts put on 27 kilos for the role of Jacky – around the same weight gain as Robert De Niro’s for Raging Bull. The proportional increase is smaller: Schoenaerts is a big man anyway whereas De Niro’s natural weight was only 145 pounds before he played Jake La Motta; while De Niro’s extra poundage took the form of flab, Schoenaerts’s is pure muscle. Jacky Vanmarsenille’s grotesquely overdeveloped physique has made his gait unbalanced; his regime of injections has left him with a permanently zonked look (his right eye seems always to be on the verge of closing). But not only zonked. There’s a hurt in his eyes which, although private, is unignorable – and perhaps not entirely private either: perhaps wanting not to be ignored at the same time as wanting to stay hidden. The adult Jacky is unrecognisable from the slender, limber child who was attacked. Yet there’s a connecting beauty between the boy (Robin Valvekens) and the man: it’s a sequence showing the birth of a calf on the farm, with (the adult) Jacky present, that somehow expresses this connection most poignantly and, in doing so, amplifies the theme of kinship between Jacky and his animals.
Matthias Schoenaerts put on, as well as weight, a prosthetic nose: it’s obviously false, in profile at least, but it gives Schoenaerts another layer to go behind and may have helped him enrich his portrait of a man who’s both protected and imprisoned by his body. In a brief excursion to another world, Jacky visits the parfumerie owned by the Schepers family, whose son maimed him and whose daughter runs the cosmetics shop: Schoenaerts gets over a fine mixture of Jacky’s shyness in the presence of a pretty young woman and his ulterior motive. (As Lucia Schepers, Jeanne Dandoy nails the unwarranted bright condescension of girls who sell expensive perfume although her acting later on is predictable.) Strung out on male hormones, Jacky is primed for aggression: he’s easily roused to physically violent anger and Michaël R Roskam several times shows him, in the shadows of his room, squaring up for a fight. Schoenaerts makes you root for Jacky to such an extent that I wanted him to take revenge for what happened to him as a child – even though I didn’t want to see acts of violence and knew such acts were the only way that Jacky could take his revenge.
The men in and on the fringes of the Flanders underworld provide a context of unprepossessing macho insensitivity in which the hugely imposing Jacky’s compromised masculinity is anomalous. So too is the repressed homosexuality of the police informer Diederik, Jacky’s childhood friend who witnessed the attack on him. Jeroen Perceval is good as Diederik but this supplementary misfit is a lame idea. Roskam’s script as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. I didn’t understand how Jacky got into the apartment where his assailant now lives a wordless, vegetative existence. I was never clear how many people outside Jacky’s family knew about his misfortune. The film takes it as a given that Jacky is bound to be lonely for the rest of his life. His boanthropic connection with the bulked-up bulls in his herd, expressed in the film’s title, is serviceable but when Jacky describes his situation and compares it to that of the bulls, the lines that Roskam supplies are overexplicit and out of character for Jacky. (The birth of the calf is such a poetic contrast to this crudeness.) Nicolas Karakatsanis’s photography of the melancholy rural landscape not only expresses Jacky’s bleak outlook but also suggests the essential but now inaccessible mildness of his spirit. The effective score is by Raf Keunen.
7 February 2013
[1] http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/bullhead/6058