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Anyone asked to name a classic of Belgian cinema can simply point to this film, a production all the more remarkable for its bargain basement provenance. Made by three film students with a budget which makes shoestrings look like a luxury, “Man Bites Dog” (“C’est arrivé près de chez vous”) is proof that making a memorable movie depends more on talent and a good story than on vast amounts of capital and an over-indulgence in special effects.
Three young film makers follow the exploits of Benoit, a mass murderer and petty criminal, and document his philosophy of life and pride in the professionalism of his work. Benoit murders people, quite instrumentally, to obtain money. Or because they get in the way. He’s not a ‘serial’ killer with a fixation about a victim type or a drive to assert himself. He’s just a guy, going about his business. The murders, the crimes are shocking because they occur in such a natural setting – the killing is unheralded, unanticipated.
“I usually start the month with a postman!” Even killer’s have their routines. Benoit explains his theories about robbery and murder, provides a masterclass in the disposal of bodies, expresses his concerns about the murder of children (it attracts too much media attention), and recounts his theories about why old people are better bets for robbery than the middle classes.
It is a film of quite shocking, deliberately disturbing violence, not least in the casual nature of the rape scene. Shot in naturalistic manner – black and white, hand held camera, exactly as if three young film makers are keeping a documentary diary of the crimes and lifestyle of a criminal. Made before the worst excesses of reality TV began to bite in Europe, it nevertheless anticipates the popular fascination with the mundane, and the ongoing appetite for murder and horror, and asks very real questions about the collaboration between the media and sensation.
The film crew, indeed, collaborate with Benoit and act as accessories – being shot at themselves, confronting another film crew following another criminal. The humour of the film is a pulsing vein. This is a film to be enjoyed as a satire. This is a film to be taken very, very seriously.
Benoit airs his views on women, race, housing, the elderly. He is the narrator. He moralises about life – he is a criminal, but his crimes follow a logic and adhere to his own brand of morality. He rants like a populist politician. The crew observe. The media, it seems, can give anyone a voice and make them seem important. But, of course, the media is only feeding the curiosity and appetites of an audience. Does the media pander to public tastes … or does it create public taste?
The criminal makes no plans. He acts spontaneously. His is a life of instant gratification, a chaotic lifestyle of self-glorification made all the more marvellous by the attentions of a film crew. Benoit poses, one moment the urbane intellectual spouting poetry and philosophy, the next brutally attacking an unsuspecting victim. He’s coarse, vulgar, intolerant, arrogant, a bully, utterly self-centred … yet the film crew elevate him to the role of star. And we watch, transfixed, wondering where the tale will take us next.
A wonderful film, beautifully assembled, which poses question after question about the art (and morality) of film making. In fact, the only question it answers is the one about naming a classic of Belgian cinema. Award winning, influential, delightful, with a very funny spoof superhero trailer as one of the DVD extras, this is a highly recommended film.
Rating: 5 / 5
Duh! For the information of the reviewer who thinks Les Artistes Anonymes are dredging over themes already explored by Tarantino’s gaudy flick, Man Bites Dog is the earlier film!!! Natural Born Killers is an embarassingly self-aware, queasy piece of postmodern posturing; Man Bites Dog is all the more disturbing for the naturalness that it never strays from. Although at times it can be very funny (perhaps the specific gravity of Belgian humour is hard to fathom) it is, in my opinion, being mis-sold as a “black comedy”. This is a very violent film, and let’s stop pussyfooting around with euphemisms about the kinds of violence: it contains a shocking rape scene. People should not be encouraged to see the film without being warned about that.
For my money, this is no spoof: it is absurdist perhaps, but that is a different matter. Austin Powers is a spoof of James Bond films, the relations are easy to identify. How and of what is this a spoof? A small film-crew film a killer (and he is not really a “serial-killer” either) going about his grim work; he regards it as a job. Absurd perhaps. But don’t expect a spoof or a black comedy, you’ll probably be disappointed.
Like many great twentieth-century works of art it shows a great (if disturbed) sense of humour, but it is also a powerful meditation on the glamorisation and worship of violence, and the complicity of such acts in the crimes that we love to gape at. But no pat observations, and no simple conclusions. The end is ample proof of that. Unlike NBK it is oblique and serious, and all the more capable of being funny because of that.
And can we start a campaign to get it renamed? The nudge-nudge, wink-wink in-joke on new journalism’s penchant for reporting the story that sells rather than the one that happens is pretty irrelevant. The French title is “C’est arrive pres de chez vous” i.e. “It happened near you(/your home)”. Watch it, and think about both titles. The current English one is catchy but ill-fitting. Sure, anyone can bodge up an argument for keeping it, but Les Artistes Anonymes chose a very different title; did such good writers really miss the better trick? Shame about the occasional white on white sub-titles too, the DVD release was a wasted opportunity to fix that.
Rating: 5 / 5
As stated in another review of this otherwise brilliant film, the subtitiles have no black border and become extremely hard to read.
I saw this at the pictures and could read everything but I hired a video version and had to turn it off because my eyes were hurting so much. Maybe the DVD version has been souped up and has better subtitles but unless you’re planning on watching this film up close to the TV…or you are very fluent in Belgian French and a lot slang words I’d maybe give it a miss which is a shame as I thought it was a brilliant film when I saw it first. It came out at about the same time as Natural Born killers which was meant to reflect the medias obsession with killers but I think this film does it so much better. It does not glamorise killers. It IS violent and not for the faint hearted but there are many depths to it without it being a THUG film as a previous reviewer seemed to think it was.
Rating: 4 / 5
I am old enough to remember the utter outrage that this film provoked when it was released and also old enough to understand that such a reaction was exactly what these guys were hoping for. ‘Man Bites Dog’ is one of those films – like ‘Baise Moi’ and ‘Henry: portrait of a serial killer’ – that has a certain cachet; like some kind of snuff film. That’s what they wanted; that’s what they got. Bravo!
Actually it’s a so-so French-language (though crucially Belgian) film that looks like it was made out of pocket money and seems to be sniggering the whole time. It is absurd. Not absurd in an Albert Camus ‘life is absurd’ kind of way – it doesn’t have the discipline for such musings – just absurd in its set-up; a group of film-makers tracking a serial killer (who’s not a proper serial killer; just someone who kills people all the time – a variant of the breed that does not exist.) Therefore, it’s hard to take seriously any point it might be making about the nature of voyuerism and screen violence. Yes it pre-dated Big Brother and the X Factor, but so did Schwarzenegger in The Running Man; prescience does not equal quality.
The rape in it is not ‘the most shocking rape ever committed to celluloid’ – for that you need Tuesday Weld and Robert De Niro in ‘Once Upon A Time In America; sexual violence played for laughs – though the amount of splatter poured onto the victim after she’s murdered does probably constitute ‘the least realistic murder victim ever committed to celluloid.’
In short, this is a silly film; condemned by the easily-offended; praised by the easily-impressed. It gets quite boring after a while; the lack of a narrative structure in a film which lacks any aesthetic interest will do that. Don’t get me wrong. There are bits I like – such as the film crew covering the ‘other’ killer and – for some reason – the little monologue on architecture, which perfectly chimed with what I think – but, really, this is like Bugsy Malone, which Alan Parker made as a stunt to get noticed.
This is a bunch of film students messing about. The furore and reverence this thing provokes must have them giggling still.
Rating: 3 / 5
I think this story is one of the most peculiar I have ever seen!! I cannot decide whether I like it and think of it as a masterpeice in film-making or a pile of garbage that was awfully acted!! The concept of the film with a crew folowing a pleasent and friendly serial killer around as he commits his awful crimes is a shocking but unexperienced style of filming that I have never seen before. It’s certainly an arty film and I would recommend to see it but I would not like to force my judgement on you about this film because as I said I cannot work out its true place in my film collection just yet.
Rating: 3 / 5