The Broken Circle Breakdown is a Belgian film highlighting bluegrass music and frustrations with traditional religion and evangelical influences in politics and medicine as told through the relationship, love, and despair of two artists. I did not get to see the other foreign films up for an Oscar this year, and I’m not sure this one will take home the statue, but I am glad I saw it.
I saw a friend after seeing The Broken Circle Breakdown today; she knew I had plans to see the movie today. She asked how it was, and I replied, “It was good,” but she looked at me quite quizzically as my face portrayed that it wasn’t necessarily good. That’s what happens when you watch a foreign film heavy in emotion, cancer, illness, love, heartbreak, grief, death, and bluegrass music.
Okay, so the music was actually most enjoyable. And yes—this was a Belgian film with bluegrass music.
The movie was for a moment difficult to follow; it jumps between past and present, which turns into past as the movie moves through the relationship of Didier and Elise, both beautifully portrayed by the Belgian actors here who can not only act but sing in an enchanting way, doing a grand job at hitting the country twang in their songs. The jumping about in the storyline is not just flashbacks, and it is not reverse chronology; when we meet them early in the film, their relationship is advanced from their initial meeting; they sit at the side of their daughter’s hospital bed. The film then skips back, then sprints forward, then eases back, and so on. Once you caught on to their happiness level and Elise’s hair length as cues, the timing movements were easier to stay with. In a way, though, these not-quite-flashbacks felt more to me like memories than just an odd way to tell the story. And I quite liked that aspect. (But I know too that not everyone will.)
The underlying tones of religion gently simmered under the surface until the end of Didier’s and Elise’s journey. But it showed itself along the way as Didier explains death (of a bird) to their daughter. Of course, whether he continues with his clinical explanation lingers as an anticipated question; their very young daughter whom we met in the hospital has cancer.
Also along the way, our timing is set when the couple watches the events of 9/11 on their television. I was puzzled why the timing of that event was key and a focus; all is revealed later and why this had to happen during that presidency in the US. And that resulting climatic outburst explains much with the film, the politics, and the frustrations.
Yes, that outburst brings a clear political statement, delivered with Didier’s explosive moment late in the film’s events. It was interesting to see this character, so enthralled with American music and yet so at odds with so much else that is of the United Sates.
The movie is good. But when I reflect on it, the pain of these lives shows on my face. And the frustration of limited medical help weighs heavy in my heart. But sometimes, that’s what makes a movie good.