Dead Man Talking (2012)
Directed by Patrick Ridremont

Film Review

One Thousand and One Nights gets a creepily modern makeover in this offbeat Belgian comedy, the first directorial offering from improvisational comedian-turned actor Patrick Ridremont.  Like Belgian chocolates, Belgian humour is an acquired taste, only several thousand times more so.  Ridremont continues his country's fine tradition of off-the-wall comedy by serving up an unmistakably Belgian concoction of comicbook lunacy laced with tar-black humour that feels like the zaniest homage to the Coen brothers imaginable.  In Dead Man Talking, Ridremont casts himself in the role of a modern Scheherazade, a condemned man who exploits a legal loophole to stay alive, only to end up being exploited himself by a corrupt political system, a TV producer who thinks he is God and the public's insatiable appetite for cheap sensationalism.

Ridremont packs an awful lot into one film and inevitably he overstretches himself a little.  Dead Man Talking sizzles with brilliant ideas and makes much of its warped concepts, but it ends up collapsing like a massively overladen donkey way before it reaches its punchline.  There isn't much to fault in the first half hour.  After a viciously violent introduction (which completely wrong-foots the spectator into expecting something along the lines of a modern slasher movie), Ridremont plunges us into what looks like the weirdest of Kafkaesque prison dramas.  It takes a while before the viewer can get his bearings but when he does so he finds himself immersed in the weirdest of black comedies.  François Berléand (Le Concert, La Fille coupée en deux) clearly has better things to do with his time than oversee an execution, and so most of the humour derives from the executioner's reluctance to perform his duties and the unwelcome presence of a bumbling prison chaplain (Christian Marin in his last screen role before his death in 2012 - he is best remembered as Merlot in the Louis de Funès Gendarme films).  Even if they had worked together, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco could not have dreamed up a more bizarre start to a play.

It all starts to go wrong as soon as Berléand rings up his superiors to clarify a point of law and we end up being hurtled into a crowd of comicbook grotesques that are intended (presumably) to represent American politicians (of the George W. Bush variety) and their aides.  The sophisticated, if not to say daring, humour of the film's first act gives way to sloppy caricature that soon becomes tiresome and predictable.  Portraying politicians as morally vacuous opportunists who will do anything to get elected is hardly original, neither is the characterisation of the unwashed masses as brainless cattle with an unwholesome addiction to the tackiest of reality TV shows.  Ridremont's film does, however, have something worth saying about how, in our increasingly godless secular society, individuals have an ever greater need for media-created icons to bring at least the illusion of meaning to their empty existences. 

It is no accident that Ridremont portrays his character in an overtly Christ-like manner, bound to an upright execution table that resembles a crucifix.  Religion may be on the way out but human beings will always have a need for icons.  The problem is that these icons are being manufactured by nasty people with a self-serving agenda and so one form of mass thought control (organised religion) may end up being replaced by something even more dangerous.  A zany comedy it may be but Dead Man Talking is also a profound and unsettling film, one that is only slightly marred by a lack of focus and self-restraint.  Because of its absurd comedic excesses, it is easy to overlook the deeper meaning that is at the heart of Ridremont's film - a bleakly pessimistic assessment of mankind's susceptibility to false prophets, a susceptibility which a minority are more than willing to exploit for their own ends...

Film Synopsis

In an undisclosed country, William Lamers is sentenced to death for homicide.  The procedure by which he is to be executed is rigidly set out by law in all but one detail.  The condemned man is allowed to make one final speech before he is killed by the state, but the law sets no limit on how long this speech can be.  The execution must take place between eight o'clock in the evening and midnight, and William just avoids being executed by recounting his life story to his audience, a priest and a journalist.  When the state governor gets to hear about this, he sees an opportunity to boost his approval rating and improve his chances in the coming elections.  William is told that he can continue to live providing he agrees to talk through the period allotted to his execution every evening, his utterances broadcast on live television.  With nothing to lose, William accepts and in no time he becomes a national media star, one that is too popular to live...