Review: Bullhead

Rundskop is the latest delectable offering from Belgian cinema, a film community which has offered us such timeless classics as... er...

OK fair enough, perhaps Bullhead doesn’t instantly seem like a masterpiece of entertainment. Two-hour biographies of the Belgian meat industry rarely are. And it has subtitles: might as well just read a book. But this film isn’t actually a study of the fulfilment of Flemish sausage quotas, it’s about gangsters. Like a pork-and-sage Scarface. Farmers use illegal narcotics to enhance their animals’ size and worth, protecting their racket with violence and intimidation. With the current international horsemeat scandal, the idea doesn’t seem so strange. But then it turns out not to be about that really either. Remove the narrative fat, and Bullhead becomes a study of small-town politics, personal crisis and emotional trauma. Meathead Jacky Vanmarsenille is the protagonist, a steroid-pumped agricultural enforcer, Flanders’ Al Capone, whose gangster paradise is stunned after the local murder of an anti-mafia cop.

An unknown childhood ordeal twisted Jacky’s soul, and now he is a hormone-ingesting brawler, tormented by some serious insecurity surrounding his masculinity. The incident is revealed later, in what is probably the most harrowing scene that I’ve witnessed in cinema. Throughout the sprawling, complex plot, he finds himself increasingly hunted and paranoid as the police reign in mob activity. Maybe the E.U. as well, up from Brussels, meddling in things (the Faragian reading). Matthias Schoenaerts plays Jacky like De Niro in Raging Bull, a stormy bundle of testosterone who fights himself as much as his adversaries. His physical movements even resemble a bull. In a sense, the film is a portrayal of man’s propensity to behave bestially.

The brute of Jacky has been created by this world of feuding and betrayal. Director Michael Roskam has managed to induce the rural community with uneasy acumen. Its brutality, conservatism and inwardness become stifling. Only the bumbling idiocy of two Walloon buffoon car mechanics offers any joviality. Racism and homophobia are a given in the static countryside of quiet farms and stale restaurants, where everyone is as grey as John Major in Spitting Image. But the nefarious criminality surfaces periodically to butcher the idyllic tranquillity. Shady local Del Boys network over steaks that would surely make a Tesco horse burger look Waitrose.

The viewer is forced to endure an intense story that will leave them with plenty to chew on. The pace of Bullhead, as can so often be the case in world cinema, is the antithesis of Hollywood’s supersonic storylines. Instead, it is pensive, pausing to digest both the splendour and wretchedness of life. The audience will have a strong emotional contract with the film: it is moving, whether in a positive or negative way is for you to decide.