REACTION: The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012, Dir. Felix van Groeningen)

Everything about Felix van Groeningen's festival pleasing, socio-spiritual bluegrass drama, The Broken Circle Breakdown, smacks of trying too hard. In adapting the initial stage play to the big screen, van Groeningen and his screenwriting team have been so intent on cinematic styling that they forgot to keep a firm grip on the all-important drama. That, they've shaved away in a storytelling chop-suey, an attempt, I imagine, to capture the power of Alejandro González Iñárritu's onetime screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga. Not a success.

Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) are wrestling with the despair of their young daughter's cancer diagnosis. Elise and Didier are meeting in a tattoo parlour. Elise and Didier are having crises with faith. Elise and Didier are having a baby. Elise and Didier are performing together in a bluegrass band. Elise and Didier falling into a relationship of mutual admiration. Elise and Didier are falling out of a relationship of mutual admiration.

I must be coming at The Broken Circle Breakdown from a different angle than those crowds that were so pleased at MIFF last year. I've been kicking myself for almost twelve months for not scheduling it after all the raving. But I needn't have. This is not a film I connected with.

It isn't cynicism, I actually love melodrama. In fact, this whole set-up should have been right up my alley. I love overtly manipulative drama. I love narratively adventurous cinema. I love intensely spiritual films. I love intrinsically musical films, a love I'll even begrudgingly stretch to bluegrass if its done well.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is all these things but none of these elements sit quite right here. What's more, it is so very insistent about being all these things that it lost me entirely. And being lost, I came to question the credibility of the film's foundations. Strip back all the editing chicanery and you're left with a rather undramatic story*: Elise and Didier in a tattoo parlour, they fall in with each other, she joins his band, they get pregnant, kid gets ill, they struggle with the fallout, breakdowns ensue.

It is well performed but it is just not that involving. Maybe I just need to have kids and a spiritual dilemma. Is that cynicism creeping through after all?

So, to qualify my list above: I love overtly manipulative drama but give me enough a foothold to invest in characters before having them turn on the waterworks. I love narratively adventurous cinema but every slice needs to be contextualised enough to allow me to feel the drama. I love intensely spiritual films but that spirituality needs to be framed in fantasy. Don't put spirituality head to head with scientific pragmatism and have spirituality win out. No dice. And I love intrinsically musical films. Full stop. I loved the musical parts of this film, despite their disorienting placement in the whole. With a little more care they could have been devastatingly powerful.

In short, despite van Groeningen's best efforts, this is a sloppy adaptation. As a film, it is an ill-formed, superficial mess. Nothing here cuts deep enough to mark The Broken Circle Breakdown as dramatically, emotionally or philosophically worthy.

I don't use the term often, but this one's over-rated.

★★☆

Trailer:

* For the record, I had the same issue with Arriaga's narrative for 21 Grams.