Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2012 by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert [Ebert, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, Guides & Reviews, General
ISBN: 9781449421502
Google: fPA0Uik2mesC
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Moscow, Belgium ★ ★ ★

NO MPAA RATING, 106 m., 2009

Barbara Sarafian (Matty), Jurgen Delnaet (Johnny), Johan Heldenbergh (Werner), Anemone Valcke (Vera), Sofia Ferri (Fien), Julian Borsani (Peter). Directed by Christophe van Rompaey and produced by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem. Screenplay by van Rijckeghem and Pat van Beirs.

She backs up her car. His big truck runs into it. She should have looked first. A truck that size shouldn’t have been in a parking lot. They get out and start screaming insults at each other. This is in a Flemish-speaking city in Belgium. We quickly learn that the f-word sounds exactly the same in English and Flemish.

Now here is the intriguing element. They are both livid with anger. Their insults escalate from their driving abilities to their genders. Women are bloodsuckers. Men are—never mind what men are. At some point, very subtle and hard to define, their insults turn into play. No, they don’t start grinning. They still both seem angry. But they grow verbally inventive, and we sense, and they sense, a shift in the weather. It ends with him asking her out for coffee.

The buried emotions in this scene play out all through Moscow, Belgium, an uncommon comedy that is fairly serious most of the time. She is Matty (Barbara Sarafian), forty-one years old. He is Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet), in his late twenties. Matty’s husband has walked out on her and her three kids. Johnny’s girlfriend left him for some rich dude. Johnny has fallen helplessly in love with her, possibly because he has met his match in insults, possibly because a woman who can think that fast on her feet can—never mind what she can do.

Their working-class neighborhood of Ghent is named Moucou, with high rises, heavy traffic, rough bars. Johnny lives here in the sleeping compartment of his truck cab. He is friendly, has eyes that smile, hair she would probably love to take a brush to. Her hair is a slightly tidier mess. She has no desire to meet a man, especially one so much younger. Her husband, Werner (Johan Heldenbergh), an art teacher, left her for a little tart who was one of his students. One cradle robber is enough for her family.

Now about her kids. They are individuals intent on their own lives and indifferent to the fact that they are in a movie. Here’s what I mean by that. Ever notice how in a lot of movies the family members are playing Family Members? The kids are arrayed around the dinner table smoothly fitting in their dialogue. Matty’s kids are Vera, about seventeen, who regards her mother with weary insight; a younger daughter, Fien, who is going through a stage of reading everyone’s Tarot cards and relating to you as if you’re the Hanging Man or The Fool; and a still younger son, Peter, who is obsessed by airplanes. Johnny comes for dinner, but they’re indifferent to him or, in Vera’s case, tactfully withdrawn.

Werner turns up when he hears about his wife’s young boyfriend, and

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