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Join Telegram ChannelFabrice du Welz freely seizes the Dutroux affair to sign a film in the style of Zodiac by David Fincher, notably carried by an immense Sergi Lopez.
Let us take Fabrice du Welz at his word openly quoting Lautréamont and his Songs of Maldoror. This long, dark, physical and bestial poem from 1869 immediately warned lost souls: “Would to heaven that the reader, emboldened and momentarily ferocious like what he reads, finds, without becoming disoriented, his abrupt and wild path, through the desolate swamps of these dark pages…» An invitation to embrace the contours of an abrasive rage. Thus contaminated, the reader had no choice but to drown in this smelly mire. Fabrice du Welz ( Calvary, Inexorable…) also puts his feet in the mud, taking inspiration from one of the darkest child-criminal cases that Belgium has known, the so-called Dutroux affair, named after this rapist and child killer from Charleroi whose he murderous itinerary ended in 1996 with the release of two girls kidnapped in a cellar. “ Steep and wild path “, potentially dangerous above all, since reopening through fiction the still raw wounds of this drama, it is the risk of being caught in the face by the wall of a reality which very often refuses to compromise with the horror which inhabits it . Du Welz takes his liberties, changes certain facts and above all, the names.
Dutroux is Dedieu here, with all the more or less baroque interpretations that this brings. The “hole” and therefore “the abyss” has given way to the supposed superpower of the inverted demon, “god” therefore. From there to mythologize evil… It is up to Sergi Lopez to have the heavy task of donning the clothes of the big bad wolf. As the film does not venture into a psychologizing quest for the murderer, we must be content with his massive presence alone which has the grace (yes, yes!) of never being cluttered with itself. With a sullen face devitalized of all humanity, the Spanish actor powerfully invests the rudimentary framework given to him without overplaying the bastards, the character actually being one. Let's put it another way: Sergi Lopez is a wonderful actor. Without him, the film would lose its balance, even if it is another field that the film explores, the very Fincherian one of the investigator obsessed to the bone with tracking. A hunt made difficult by a police war which was then plaguing Belgium. The puzzle pieces, apparently quite simple to assemble, will remain scattered for a long time on the ground of a world in ruins. Because basically, it is a region devastated by the crisis that Fabrice de Welz films. And it is from this realistic anchoring that the filmmaker draws the telluric force of his social and brutal thriller. The incredible violence is combined with the sadness of a tired territory within which flows the bloody waters of the Sambre which seem to follow a cursed course (see the series of the same name by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade which we think of a lot in its aesthetic with raw realism)
We enter the story through the youthful eyes of Paul (Anthony Bajon), an inexperienced police officer who seeks to uncover the monster nearby. Paul, being without roots, is an integral part of a setting to which he is admitted thanks to his connection with Jeanne (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) from a Sicilian family established in the region. Du Welz bluntly quotes theJourney to the end of hell by Cimino and its extended wedding scene in a working-class environment, the last dance before darkness. Paul “emboldened, and became momentarily fierce as he» lives, advances, digs, approaches, touches the truth, comes up against his hierarchy, breathes the same air as the demon, falls… Alone facing the evil one who escapes but whose trace could well be imprinted on the surface of a rotten television in the middle of the night. Have we seen the ignominy at work? Do the images have evidentiary value? “The delirium of sick reason» by Maldoror was ultimately accompanied by clairvoyance.
By Fabrice du Welz. With Anthony Bajon, Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Sergi Lopez… Duration: 2h35. Released January 15, 2025