The Sexual Life of the Belgians (1994)
Jan Bucquoy narrates the story of his sexual life to age 28, imagining his conception (parents drunk, the encounter lasting ten seconds) and reporting his first orgasm (at the hands of Eddy, in a beach-side caravan, as they watch Laurel and Hardy), his comparative experiences with girls, and his move from Harelbeck to Brussels. There he meets Greta, bartender at a Bohemian cafe, who teaches him the Kama Sutra, the naked Esther, who reads him stories, and Thérèse, his wife for three years. They split after two children; he moves to a small flat, writes pornography to pay the bills, works sporadically on a novel, espouses anarchism, and meets more women. His self-confidence grows.
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Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
This movie reminds me of Balzac, the little hero Lucien (here Jan) who starts at a remote village in the deep of Flanders and moves to the great Paris (Brussels). It is the astonishing encounter of the fourth kind with beautiful ladies and the fauna of the night crowd of a roaring city. Artists, whores, poets and all the like mix up in this beautiful expressed and imaged close up of the capital of the Belgians in the seventies. This movie has nothing to do about sex, it is just a romantic comedy of life. This movie remains actual by its surprising flair and capturing of mind and imaginative dialogs. In some Line it is difficult to translate this film. One of the best Belgian movies I ever saw, deserves a 9.
Road movie on the road of life in Belgium of the sixties. Cool! Dark comedy about a writer who wants to become world-famous by leaving his village and his family and going to Brussels. I like his conservative father who is regularly drunk and his aunt who proclaims a big future for him. His sexual initiation at a camping with the movies of Laurel and Hardy at the background is a bad start for him! The movie changes of tone in the second part and becomes more bitter. You can still laugh with the many sketches in which the main actor staggers between self-indulgence and self-critical spot. Splendid photography.
This movie is not entirely autobiographical: I think the author takes his life as a model to narrate us the problem of the upbringing youth and their sexual apprenticeship. He starts from his native Harelbeke, a little town in Belgium. His first sexual experience is with "sale culotte" which remains a no-event. He must learn his first kiss, and after all his beginnings are very romantic. Then he moves to Brussels, the university with the demonstrations against Vietnam and where he hopes to start his career as a writer. The film develops in free sketches which show his marriage and divorce and all the lovely girls he meets. After all this film can be shown to kids of ten years old and with some comment by the parents I am sure they will learn a lot which can be very useful for their adult life.
This film starts as a rapid-fire series of childhood memories, narrated by the main char. These episodes all have a sexual flavour. My favourite is the beautiful aunt who never wears knickers and parades around in the nude in front of the young boy, who concentrates only on his painting. But it goes downhill fast after that. The story completely loses focus, and is a lot less sexy. Disappointing, after such a promising start.