«He couldn't possibly escape the hostile interpretations, and he knew it.»
So begins one of the sharper critiques of Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael's latest work—the man behind the brilliant Toto the Hero—which presents yet another collision between the "normal" (Antoine Auteuil) and the "different" (Pascal Duquenne). The first is the typical forty-something executive: divorced, estranged from his wife and daughters, no longer loved. His only concern is teaching young managers the hypocrisy of the business world. Through endless pretense, he has lost himself entirely. The second is a boy with Down syndrome—orphaned, solitary, abandoned in a care facility for the handicapped. The plot is predictable enough; it breaks no new ground in what has become a genre unto itself (My Left Foot, Rain Man). What strikes harder is Van Dormael's style: a mixture of tones that moves almost naïvely across disparate registers—the realism of drama, the surrealism of dream sequences (the most linguistically and visually interesting), comic grotesque (risky, not always successful), and a facile, often banal poetry that too often oversimplifies, diminishes, and obscures the true complexity of these lives.
What message reaches viewers who have never encountered the world of the "different"? Hard to say. But throughout the screening, something feels absent. A vague incompleteness haunts the narrative. Imprecision. Certain moments harden into clichés, and the boy becomes a mask, a character—tragic one moment, comic the next, always confined within a part too narrow and only fitfully convincing.
It is banal, and hardly original anymore, to present the relationship between "normal" and "different" as one-directional. Yes, we need them; through them we often learn to see things more truly. But they need us too—our presence, our help, our patience. This detail seems entirely lost on the director. There is no real space in his world for "them." Indeed, the protagonist would rather join his beloved mother in heaven than be a burden to the now "healed" Antoine Auteuil.
Still, the film engages with a reality rarely explored in cinema. The applause and tears that greeted the awards ceremony at Cannes—particularly the best performance prize for young Pascal Duquenne—do leave one wondering.
- Emanuele, 1996