Ultranova (2005)
Directed by Bouli Lanners

Film Review

Belgium has never gone out of its way to promote itself as the most alluring place in Europe but, in his eye-opening debut feature, Bouli Lanners portrays his native Wallonia as the kind of place no one would ever want to live in, let alone visit, the only use to which it could reasonably be put being to provide a suitably grim backdrop for the most austere and depressing post-apocalyptic fantasy.  Ultranova is an intensely personal film d'auteur in which Lanners reflects on his concerns about where civilisation may be heading, towards an arid urban wasteland in which human beings have lost not only the capacity to communicate with one another, but also the ability to feel true, meaningful emotions.  What makes this vision of Hell so chilling is that it is so patently near to where we are now.  Lanners doesn't insult our intelligence by offering us a fanciful stab in the dark; instead, he makes a plausible extrapolation from the present, towards a future that we can already glimpse by looking at the world around us.

One of Belgium's best-known and most talented actors, Lanners is most famous for his television sketches, although he has appeared in many prominent Belgian and French films, including Benoît Mariage's Les Convoyeurs attendent (1999), Yolande Moreau's Quand la mer monte (2004) and Mathias Gokalp's Rien de personnel (2009).  Prior to Ultranova, Lanners had already garnered some acclaim as a filmmaker with his two short films, Travellinckx (1999) and Muno (2001), and these provided an effective springboard for his first feature, which embraces similar themes, on a much grander canvas.

Ultranova can be thought of as a kind of ultra-realist, ultra-minimalist film noir.  It concerns a group of ordinary people who have become trapped in a meaningless, loveless existence and dream of a better life with absolutely no chance of finding it.  Dispensing with the linear narrative as though it were a cumbersome accessory, Lanners constructs his film as a puzzle, leaving it to the spectator to make some sense of the disconnected fragments of which it is composed.   The film immediately grabs our attention with a boldly surreal opening sequence, in which the main character climbs out of an upended car plonked in the middle of a field.  A humorous metaphor for a world that has been turned on its side, this opening connects with the abrupt ending, the impression being that the protagonists are trapped forever in a closed circle of futility and despair.

The utter hopelessness of this ultra-dreary world is brought home to us by the three male protagonists, who make their living selling houses that have as much appeal as a cardboard box soaked in rat urine.  Of these three, Dimitri (sensitively portrayed by Vincent Lécuyer) is the most sympathetic, but he finds it hard to communicate with others and resembles a severely autistic child, clearly hoping to find affection but untrusting of the one person who can offer it him.  Verbrugghe (played by Vincent Belorgey, better known as the electro-pop sound artist Kavinsky) is the complete opposite - a man who is in a permanent state of rage, sounding off whenever the mood takes him and unable to find a sympathetic ear. Michaël Abiteboul's Phil is just as unprepossessing, a cynic with a malicious sense of humour who remarks, when his colleague kills himself, that he died of an overdose of "vie de con".

Before becoming an actor, Lanners made a successful career as an artist, and this shows in the strong visual sense that he brings to all of his films.  The bleak urban landscape of Ultranova owes much to the works of the American realist painter Edward Hopper.  Filmed in widescreen with a palette almost denuded of colour, it emphasises the unbridgeable gulf between the protagonists as well as the emptiness of their lives.  Bleak and poetic, the film paints a gloomy picture of a society that has come close to being totally dehumanised, where individuals live in pre-fabricated houses that perfectly reflect the character of their owners - empty shells set apart like self-contained worlds in a colourless wilderness.  It is a safe, sterile environment where people no longer take risks and have long forgotten what it means to be happy, a place where compassion lies dead and forgotten in an unmarked grave.  Welcome to the third millennium.

Film Synopsis

Dimitri is an introverted 20-something who sells turnkey houses with his colleagues Phil, a prankster, and Verbrugghe, a moody manic depressive.  Near to their office, two girls, Cathy and Jeanne, work in a warehouse that stocks cheap furniture.  When she hears rumours that Dimitri's parents died in a terrible accident when he was young, Jeanne begins to take an interest in him.  Unused to this kind of attention, Dimitri is uncertain how to respond...