By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.4
Director: Michael R. Roskam
Starring: Barbara Sarafian | Jeanne Dandoy | Jeroen Perceval | Matthias Schoenaerts
Original language title: Rundskop
Country: belgium
Year: 2012
Running time: 124
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821593/
Jason says: “BULLHEAD stands as evidence that if you make the effort, you can find an epic tale in the most unlikely of places. Here, writer/director Michael R. Roskam takes us to a cattle farm in Limburg, Belgium, where seemingly unconnected threads conspire to undermine the seeming solidity of a man who, at least physically, seems indomitable.
“That man is Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts), a muscular mountain of a man who lives and works on the family farm, still single in his mid-thirties. Any ideas the audience might have about a pastoral farming community goes right out the window early, as Jacky uses his bulk to intimidate someone into using his product – bulk that comes in large part from using pharmaceutical cousins to the hormones the Vanmarsenille bulls are loaded up with. It’s those hormones that will set half of the film’s trouble in motion, as a cop investigating the ‘hormone mafia’ has just been killed by a pair of Flemish gangsters (Frank Lammers & Sam Louwyck), and a connection via Walloon mechanics Christian and David Filippini (Erico Salamone and
Philippe Grand’Henry) may wrongly lead to Jacky’s brother Stieve (Kristof Renson), and Jacky’s old friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval) is informing to the cops. Plus, there’s Lucia Schepers (Jenne Dandoy), a lovely girl tied to the incident in Jacky’s past that, more than anything else, made Jacky the man he is today.
“There’s a lot going on in this movie, and it can be very easy to get tripped up if one is not paying close attention – one detective angrily declares that she doesn’t believe in coincidences, and the presence of a couple certainly makes the pattern of connections more complicated. Also, large parts of the story are fairly Belgium-specific: Roskam places the action in three different parts of the country, and certain tensions are exacerbated by the country’s bi-lingual nature: Most of the characters are Dutch-speaking Flemish, while others are French-speaking ‘Walloons’, and the plot can often turn on whether or not someone can understand a conversation going on right in front of him or assumed class differences that may not be immediately clear from the film’s one-size-fits-all English subtitling.
“To a certain extent, though, much of that complication can be taken or left, because BULLHEAD would still be an intriguing movie if all it had going for it was Matthias Schoenaerts. Reportedly packing on sixty pounds for the role, Schoenaerts paints a convincing portrait of a man who is missing something vital and overcompensates for it to a terrifying extent, even as doing so makes him more and more unstable. There’s a tormented slowness and frustration to his frustration, rather than a screaming ‘roid rage’, that drags him down beautifully.
“The rest of the cast is quite the intriguing lot, too. Roskam might have wound up with a pretty good movie if he’d focused on Jeroen Perceval’s Diederik, for instance; Perceval plays the man as always nervous, caught in a vice by Barbara Sarafian’s lead detective Eva Forrestier and probably smart enough to know that his closeted sexuality is being used to manipulate him, but too desperate to find a way out to handle it. Jeanne Dandoy does a nice job of keeping up as her role grows in importance in the second half of the movie, playing a perfect combination of cool and terrified in a climactic scene against Scoenaerts that is as tragic as it is tense.
“The roots of that come from a horrifying flashback scene that seems to come out of nowhere but later hangs like a cloud over the entire movie, eventually tying into the crime storyline more directly but in the meantime forcing the audience to wonder at the misplaced shame and restricted concepts of masculinity. I’m not sure that the tie-in is quite as smooth as it should be, but it does an impressive job of pulling the film’s various elements together for some final, tragic moments. Another intriguing thing Roskam does is to keep the inciting event that causes the collapse of everything – the detective’s murder – a relatively undramatic event, even though it changes everything.
“That’s some impressive work by Roskam, Shoenaerts, and company: A small crime story that leads to one a great performance and an almost operatic story. 4 1/2 cats
“Seen 15 July 2011 in Salle J.A. de Seve (Fantasia 2011)”
Diane says: “Interesting that BULLHEAD got three noms–best movie, director, and actor — and yet as far as I can tell, only Jay weighed in on it. This is the film, you may recall, that has the bizarre IMDB synopsis: ‘A young cattle farmer is approached by a veterinarian to make a deal with a notorious beef trader.’
“BULLHEAD was painful to watch for a few reasons: it’s hard to follow; its particularly Belgian elements were beyond my ken, including the Walloon-Flemish divide; and it carries a sense of inevitable destiny that I really couldn’t buy.
“At the very beginning of the movie, I thought, ‘hey, the main character looks like the guy from the other night’s RUST
AND BONE’ (he is), but that thought vanished from my mind as Matthias Schoenaerts took over this very different persona: a
frustrated farmer hepped up on hormones. I can see that a viewer could glean a lot from a second viewing–appreciation of the imagery, and of course better comprehension of the storyline and who’s who. Two flaws: the main character says ‘All I’ve ever known is animals’ yet we always see him either by himself or with people, not animals; and the actor who plays him as a boy is not very good. 3 cats”
Toni responds: “BULLHEAD was one some top film lists in this group and even after seeing it a year ago was one of the best films that Paul and I have seen.
“While BULLHEAD is dark, the layers of the story are engaging and emotional and pull layer by layer like and onion with very powerful editing choices and strong uses of flashbacks.
“Also, my take is that he works with around cattle and has been treated like the cattle so he himself is like an animal. The scenes with him as a boy were very powerful for me so if they did not work for you, you might not appreciate how it all comes together.
“I had given it 5 plus cats and I believe Julie recently saw it and loved it.
“I like to feel moved when I see a film and get the chills by being taken to another place which this certainly did for me.”
Julie responds: “Yes I gave it a 5 cats as well. I saw it after the noms and I do recall a buzz about it that was in fact in people’s top 10 lists which is why I made a point to see it sooner than later.
“I agree with Toni. Dark, engaging and very emotionally moving film in which layer by layer, things are revealed. I was thinking I would have to skip back to figure who was who, but then all that was explained as the movie went on, at least for the important characters. What I also liked is that things did not happen in a formulaic nice and tidy way, which made the movie more real for me, but also very sad and unforgiving, very much like the real world can be.”