Last night I watched Eldorado, which is showing as part of the London Film Festival. It was directed by and stars Bouli Lanners and was described as “absurdist Belgian noir”, which was good enough to sell me a ticket.
It’s the epitome of a festival film – meandering, slow paced, beautifully shot, enigmatic and poignant. It also contains several extended shots of one of my favourite filmic landscapes – the flat, featureless expanses of the French and Belgian countryside, punctuated by small, neat, desolate villages and grey motorways carrying people somewhere else.
Lanners himself plays a car salesman who interrupts a burglary at his house, then embarks on a journey to take the interrupted burglar back home, to his parents’ house near the French border. Lanners resembles Brian Blessed crossed with David Bellamy. There is an astonishing and hilarious scene starring Alain Delon, surely one of France’s greatest actors and star of Le Samourai, as a nudist caravanner.
Watch a trailer here. It is also Belgium’s official entry to the OSCARS.