Dir.
Bouli Lanners, Belgium-France, 2005, 86 mins
Cast:
Vincent Lecuyer, Marie du Bled, Helene de Reymaeker, Michael Abiteboul
In retrospect the determined irony of the title is enough to make you wince and that's just for starters. I assume that 'super-' wouldn't have had the perverse bravado that director Bouli Lanners was after when he alighted upon such a hyperbolic neologism (I know that it's a neologism because the spell check won't have it) - Ultranova - to describe the eye-watering, vision-splitting, banality, surrealism, toe-curling bathetic bombast and intense melancholy of car-park-sized swathes of his debut feature. Get that on your poster and get this, the film's not half bad. but it's probably an acquired taste.
'Acquired' in the same way that you might 'acquire' that most sinister and mundane of illnesses the mumps , rumoured to rob any unsuspecting, or even suspicious, gent of his manhood if caught past puberty. Like Dimitri - not so much the anti- as the inverted- hero of Ultranova, the Ultra-hero if you like - who is past his second decade and has caught the romantic equivalent of the dreaded contraceptive disease. In case you struggled with that last patch of purple prose let me emphasise that Dimitri has no obvious illnesses aside from those we might broadly term 'arrested development', 'post-modern Belgium' and perhaps, you'll be the judge, 'an inaptly prolix reviewer' if indeed the latter two aren't synonymous with the first.
A film in which epiphany - like the last bus on a Saturday night - is forever postponed, Ultranova though hardly energetic or explosive merits its title insofar as it evokes a light that all-too-briefly burns brighter than before only to desolately fade. At one juncture gawky, tongue-stunted, effeminate Dimitri (Vincent Lecuyer) perches on the end of an unfinished bridge, highly symbolic of thwarted escape and miscommunication, ineptly attempting to woo an oblivious Cathy (Helene de Reymaeker). Dimitri is enflamed by the energy of imagined love only to have his declaration inopportunely and insensitively bowdlerised by this rather bovine gum-chewing girl who will, alas, remain in his dreams. Throughout, the brightest light in a literal sense is the etiolated fluorescence of stultifying factory and office spaces, not the cloud-hidden sun in a perennially overcast sky. Check the suicide rate: in these environs it must be as high as the pulse rate is low.
There's a lot of space in Ultranova (as well as at least one suicide) and it falls into three distinct kinds: field and sky space, factory and housing space, personal and public space. The latter covers the space between people, both literal and metaphorical, which is pretty vast, while the implication is that the fields and sky are simply awaiting colonisation at the hands of acquisitive property developers to become further factories and housing. Dimitri works for 'Sweet Home' (further indication of 'Ironist at Work') selling properties and thus conspiring in his own alienation as he constructs the landscape that separates and attenuates the affective space between its inhabitants; there's no private space at all in the sense that there's no domesticity yet everyone is trapped in their own worlds. Actually, for all those varieties of space read time-space because the length of time it takes for Dimitri to amble across a field or speak to Cathy, which is longer, conjures considerable ennui-laden longueurs that may jade audience sensibilities.
In this industrial belt there's housing but no homes; space but no sense of place; location but none of the orientation that comes from tradition (Dimitri tells Cathy that he's an orphan). The single most exciting event of the film is completely undercut by an airbag. So there are limited alternatives: self-help or self-harm, escape or inversion. An up-ended car suggests that 'escape' may be unlikely but that 'inversion' may have its own potential. After all an Ultranova may become a black hole, from which nothing can escape, which may offer a gateway to another universe. With no direction, no tradition, in a completely sanitised, monotonous environment who's to say what's up or down?
It's a rhetorician's strategy, it's the director's strategy, and it's another, perhaps indefinitely, postponed epiphany: a question-mark hanging in space. I have to say that Ultranova does drag slightly in places but in a way that's entirely to the point. Lecuyer is great in the central role and Marie du Bled is very affecting as Cathy's mousy friend. The look of the film is a bit like a lava lamp and it is always wryly amusing, occasionally very funny. Overall however the impression is of sparse despair and bittersweet surrealism (the latter a long-standing Belgian speciality) in a film of ironic understatement.
Peter Fraser
ICA Projects have announced the UK DVD release of Ultranova for 26th June 2006 priced at £19.99.
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