REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

By: Susannah Breslin
May 28, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

MAN BITES DOG | RÉMY BELVAUX, ANDRÉ BONZEL, BENOÎT POELVOORDE | 1992

It’s hard to imagine Man Bites Dog being made today. The 1992 French-language Belgian faux documentary otherwise known as C’est Arrivé Près de Chez Vous (It Happened Near Your Home), is relentlessly offensive — its hero, if he can be called that, a serial killer named Ben who shoots, strangles, and smothers men, women, and children with equal impunity. Rendered in black and white on 16 mm film, the movie follows a documentary crew following Ben’s murderous exploits. Between kills, he recites poetry, appreciates the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and plays the piano. What’s not to like?

A woman is choked to death as the camera hovers voyeuristically over the scene. Ben disposes of her body in a river. He visits his mother, who coos: “How’s my little boy?” (“A darling!” she recalls of his youth.) An elderly woman who allows Ben and the crew to enter her unit after he claims they’re filming a documentary on loneliness in high-rise apartments is scared to death — literally — when Ben screams in her ear: “Granny Snuff, ever been snuffed out?” Ben prefers to kill and rob old people because, he explains, young people “stink of poverty.” He’s had his heart broken; “I’ve been hurt,” he laments. He enjoys the camera crew’s attention, it seems, telling a friend: “They’re doing a thing on me.”

Eventually, Ben recruits the crew into his business. He offers to fund the project with his ill-gotten gains, proclaiming: “We’ll turn this into an epic!” The sound guy is killed in a shootout. The director, Remy, played by the movie’s actual director, Rémy Belvaux, helps move a body. When Ben undertakes a home invasion in the suburbs, the little boy who lives in the house escapes. Remy holds the captured boy down as Ben suffocates the child with a pillow. (During the killing, Remy asks, “Do you kill many children?” Ben replies no, asserting: “I don’t like infanticide.” He adds: “Kids aren’t good for business, Remy.”) More murders happen. A replacement sound guy gets killed, too.

In an abandoned building, the men encounter a rival documentary crew following a rival serial killer, and Ben and his crew take out the competition. The men end up getting drunk at a bar, drinking a cocktail called a Dead Baby Boy. (The recipe: a “tear of gin,” a “river of tonic,” and an olive tied to a sugar cube with a string. In this drinking game, whoever’s sugar cube dissolves first, causing the olive to rise to the surface, loses and buys the next round.) “I am cinema!” a falling down drunk Ben scream-sings. Suffice to say, things go downhill from there, for everyone involved. Cinema is a messy art, it appears.

Today, Man Bites Dog is part of the Criterion Collection. Of course, the movie is not so much about murder but about art-making, a wry, clever, obscene take on what is required to create something: an unblinking eye and lots of bloodshed.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

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