Beyond the Multiplex

Fast forward: "Deliverance" meets "Texas Chain Saw" in the Belgian outback; talking dirty in "Conversations With Other Women"
Belgium: What's the deal? Does living in a small, flat and boring country make you all freaks or what? No one has yet explained to me why Belgian cinema has become a hotbed of interesting and adventurous films, but it's true anyway. (And why is it only French-speaking Belgium? Aren't there any weird, art-damaged Flemings out there?)

Leaving aside that fascinating topic, I think Fabrice du Welz's debut feature "Calvaire (The Ordeal)" marks the high point so far of Eurohorror, the recent effort to adapt the most fundamentally American of movie genres to the peculiar circumstances of contemporary Europe. (We're not counting something like Eli Roth's "Hostel," which is ersatz Eurohorror, an imitation of an imitation.) At its best, Eurohorror imports the plots and villains of classic horror movies but establishes them in stark, realistic settings and avoids the most calcified American genre clichés.

"Calvaire" offers an archetypal setup, in which a handsome but naive protagonist winds up in the rural backwoods, at the hands of some natives who are much, much too friendly. Du Welz rips off more movies than I can count, from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" to "The Shining," "Deliverance," "Misery" and "Psycho," but the results are so insane, so blackly hilarious and, yes, so horrifying, that I can't object.

Let's begin with the fact that our so-called hero, Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is a low-end Tom Jones-style lounge singer who thrills Belgian women of a certain age. He thrills them a lot; nude Polaroids are thrust into his hand, and his hand is thrust into places where no other hand has ventured for some time. Is he a nice or likable guy? It's hard to say; he's good-looking but diffident, and seems almost entirely passive with his lustful admirers.

When Marc's van breaks down in the nowheresville region of Fagnes, sometimes referred to as the Siberia of Belgium, he finds a half-abandoned inn run by a sad-sack former comedian named Bartel (Jackie Berroyer). Bartel is mourning the wife who ran off some years ago and seems overly delighted to have the company of a real performing artist; his only friend is a local named Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard), who seems similarly preoccupied with his missing dog.

I'm not even going to hint at where "Calvaire" goes from there; let's just say that the aforementioned barroom dance scene (set to discordant piano music), and the fact that Boris kidnaps a calf, believing it to be his lost dog, are not the strangest things in the picture. "Calvaire" isn't for the squeamish (and the Fagnes tourist board sure won't like it) but to my taste it never crosses the line into pointless sadism. It's an intensely crafted and genuinely memorable horror film from a striking new talent. (Opens Aug. 11 in New York, with other cities to follow.)

In "Conversations With Other Women," Helena Bonham Carter plays a character identified in the credits as "Woman," while Aaron Eckhart's character is known only as "Man." Add that to director Hans Canosa's reliance on the split-screen technique (while one character is talking, we can also watch the other one listening) -- and the fact that look-alike actors play the same two characters as younger people -- and you might think we're in the realm of unbearable pretension.

Strangely, we're not. I still don't know what the title means (there aren't really any other women in the film, or any conversations with them), but Canosa's talky, mini-Chekhovian anatomy of a pickup is witty and surprisingly effective. Carter and Eckhart's characters meet at a wedding, where she's a bridesmaid and he's a relative. They begin to flirt, and at first we think they don't know each other. Next we think they used to know each other a little, and bit by bit it becomes clear that, yes, they're about to go to bed and, yes, they used to know each other very well indeed.

I found the film powerfully erotic, although it has minimal nudity and no explicit sex. That goes back to the old saw that the best sex is in your head; Canosa's rapid, back-and-forth dialogue captures the unique intensity of the kind of flirtation that's leading straight to the sack, and who among us has not had that experience (or at least a near-miss) amid the drunkenness of a wedding party? Carter and Eckhart may both be doing a little indie film like this because their Hollywood careers haven't quite worked out, but never mind. They're both terrific here as damaged, mostly likable people determined to rub salt in each other's wounds one more time. God knows we can all identify with that. (Opens Aug. 11 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco; and Aug. 25 in Chicago and Seattle, with more cities to follow.)

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