An oddball odyssey marked by deadpan comedy tinged with melancholy, Bouli Lanners’ Eldorado charts the preposterous relationship between a man and his would-be robber. Yvan (Lanners) imports, refurbishes, and sells American cars in rural Belgium, a business that the scruffy, portly, distant man seems only moderately interested in. Upon returning home from work, he discovers that his house is in the process of being burgled, and that the culprit is still hiding under his bed. An annoyed standoff ensues, culminating in Yvan thwarting lanky thief Elie (Fabrice Adde) from escaping and, upon realizing that the two-bit criminal is a junkie, kindly offering to give him a ride. Thus begins a contrived road-trip to the home of Elie’s parents on the Belgium-France border in which the duo form an uneasy rapport while all manner of drolly strange happenings frustrate their travels, from Elie’s bizarrely clever trick of taping a drunk driver’s hair to the car ceiling as a means of keeping him awake, to the amusingly random sight of a man emerging from a mobile home in nothing but a hat and sandals and casually introducing himself as “Alain Delon.”
Writer, director and star Lanners, whose forthcoming, entrancingly weird Louise-Michel recently premiered at the Museum of Modern Art/Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films series, exhibits a sturdy command of tone in his follow-up to 2005’s Ultranova. Alternating between empathetic close-ups and deep-focus master shots, Lanners dryly expresses the lonely distance between Yvan and Elie, as well as between the men and both their compatriots and environment. In its reverent depiction of the sparsely populated countryside and its open roads, Jean-Paul de Zaeytijd’s cinematography has a distinct Americana vibe, as does Renaud Mayeur’s score, full of jangly, rhythmic, slightly dissonant guitar rock that intermittently adorns the duo’s journey. A pall of isolation and powerlessness hangs over Eldorado even during its humorous moments, a mood born from Yvan and Elie’s aimless course and their similar loss of – and longing for – family, and epitomized by a sustained shot of Elie’s mother silently, heartbreakingly tearing up as the reprimands and insults batted back and forth between Elie and his dad echo downstairs.
Throughout their expedition, which soon takes them from Elie’s childhood home to a highway underpass where a fateful incident sends both spiraling south, Lanners and Adde never so much as crack as a smile. Despite this absence of overt mirth, and even in light of both actors’ modulated performances, what ultimately prevents Eldorado from generating any serious comedic energy is absurdity – such as a run-in with a man (I Stand Alone and High Tension’s Philippe Nahon) who collects cars with dents created from fatal collisions with civilians – that feels unduly strained and limp. Ambling forward on its own peculiar wavelength, the story eventually reveals a motivation for Yvan’s kindness that seems to portend third-act joint redemption. Yet cheery melodrama isn’t in the film’s DNA, and its quizzical action instead closes in surprisingly, satisfyingly downbeat fashion, with Yvan and Elie’s chance encounter with a critically injured Doberman leading to a finale that argues against the fantasy of heroically saving someone else, and in favor of finding your own salvation in small gestures of mercy.