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© Thomas Dhanens 16 Felix ALFrESCO IN CANNES THIS MAy, FILMMAKER FELIx VAN gROENINgEN WAS BRIEFLy TO BE SEEN BICyCLINg DOWN THE MAIN CANNES THOROUgHFARE, LA CROISETTE, WITH NO CLOTHES ON AT ALL. NOT THAT HE’S A NATURIST. IT WAS ALL PART OF A STUNT TO SUPPORT THE DIRECTORS’ FORTNIgHT SCREENINg OF HIS NEW FILM THE MISFORTUNATES WHICH FEATURED A SCENE OF THE NE’ER-DO-WELL STRUBBE BROTHERS RIDINg NAKED ON BIKES. THE STUNT - COVERED IN MEDIA OUTLETS ALL OVER THE WORLD - DIDN’T gIVE THE yOUNg DIRECTOR MUCH PLEASURE. by geoffrey Macnab ‘we mentioned it once in a meeting but then we forgot about it. we said, no, stupid idea,’ van groeningen recalls of the idea of the bike ride in cannes. his film’s French sales agents Mk2 liked the idea of the director in the buff with some of his key collaborators. van groeningen and co. weren’t so keen but were eventually talked Felix van groeningen round. that’s why the world’s journalists were confronted by naked belgians on bikes. weeks after his alfresco cycling, van groeningen can’t entirely hide his embarrassment. at the same time, his pride at being able to make such an impact at the world’s most important film festival is obvious too.
The Misfortunates is based on an autobiographical novel by dimitri verhulst. it tells of the deeply dysfunctional strubbe brothers − hairy, hard-drinking layabouts leading a nihilistic life in a dead-end provincial town, looking for escape at the bottom of a beer glass or in the roy orbison music they so love. the narrator, looking back on his childhood, is gunther, the sensitive and articulate son of the boorish Marcel (koen de graeve). HUMOUR AND RAWNESS verhulst has been nicknamed ‘the jacques brel of Flemish literature’. his novels are grim but scabrously funny affairs, drawing heavily on his own troubled childhood. van groeningen had long followed his writing. ‘i loved his style: that combination of humour and rawness. there are really rough situations with real people. when you read the novels, you are embarrassed and you want to laugh,’ the director reflects on the novelist. when van groeningen first approached verhulst about a potential collaboration, the novelist wasn’t keen. he didn’t like van groeningen’s ideas. ‘he immediately said no!’ a year or so later, The Misfortunates was published. van groeningen read it immediately ‘to see if there was a film in it.’ at first, the director was sceptical that there was any scope for a film adaptation, the book consisted of nine chapters. its style was anecdotal and very personal. there wasn’t much development of character or obvious narrative momentum. however, after he had finished the book, the director began to see ways he could bring the story to the screen. one key episode comes late in the book when the narrator gunther, by then an adult, visits his grandmother, who is suffering dementia and living in a home. he tells the old woman how much she meant to him and reassures her that he has been able to make something of his life, in spite of his adverse upbringing. this, the director decided, could work as an important framing device in the film. audiences would be aware that the narrator was looking back on his troubled childhood from a settled and even contented perspective. IMMENSELy APPEALINg The Misfortunates is set in an industrial town 20 km or so outside brussels. here, once a year, there is a carnival. all the men in the town dress up as women, drink all they can and piss and vomit in the streets. the town has its own rich folklore. all this is caught vividly in van groeningen’s film. on the face of it, a sensitive arthouse director like van groeningen doesn’t appear to have much in common with the boorishness of the low-life characters in The Misfortunates. arguably, that’s what makes the film seem so rich. the director brings a lyrical and humorous touch to characters and situations that, in other hands, could easily seem dour in the extreme. Moreover, the director believes he has an affinity with the world that verhulst is describing. ‘i have seen a lot of different environments in my youth and life,’ he says. ‘it is not where i come from but my own parents split up and then they came back together. they had a lot of lives. one of the lives that my father had was that he was a bartender. For a long period, i lived above the bar. it was really quite a rough bar. i went there before school. i got up and my mum was working there and sometimes my father too.’ before going off to school, van groeningen would stop by for a hot chocolate. he’d see the drunks who had been in the bar all night. while making The Misfortunates, he felt close to the strubbe brothers. despite their self-destructive behaviour, there was something about the characters that he found immensely appealing. his casting was surprising. as the drunken, boorish father, he chose koen de graeve an actor best known for playing genial, laid-back types. de graeve had appeared in van groeningen’s earlier film, With Friends 17 MaVerick © bart dewaele
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