Lucas
Versantvoort / 5 Nov 2015
According to
director Jaco van Dormael, God is not some incorporeal being floating in
the clouds, but a sadistic man living in an apartment in Brussels with his
weak-willed wife and 10-year-old daughter Ea. Even worse, it's The Old
Testament God full of fire and brimstone who spends his days creating new
universal laws intended to annoy people. Ea is fed up, releases everyone's
dates of death and flees to the real world to find new apostles and write her
own brand new testament. Yet the film contains more than just a few laughs and
ends up being quite profound in a delightfully non-patronizing way.
The film is
basically split into several segments, each one devoted to one of the six new
apostles Ea finds. Finding them seems to be the story's main drive, but in the
end it becomes about each of their stories. They all represent certain
recognizable facets of human behavior: there's the businessman who, after
discovering when he'll die, realizes he's been living a lie.
The film's
filled to the brim with visual flair: when Man is created and wandering the
Earth, his groin is censored. The man notices this and tries to get rid of this
black bar covering his manhood, but to no avail. There's also a beautiful scene
involving a severed hand dancing on a table as one of the apostles, a woman
with a prosthetic arm watches (trust me, it works).
There's great
comedy strewn about this film, but some of the funniest bits involve God having
trouble getting used to life on Earth. After spending so long creating sadistic
rules, it's hilarious to see him get a taste of his own medicine. Funnier still
is when he protests, stating that he's God which everyone dismisses as the
ranting of a raving lunatic. When he's being manhandled, he hilariously says
threatens that he'll give his attackers psoriasis, warts or inflict them with a
permanent case of premature ejaculation.
Not every skit
holds up: the ones involving a guy tempting fate by falling off of great
heights to see if he'll survive or a romance involving a gorilla wear out their
welcome, but hey, when you've got a beautiful shot of someone literally
embracing his own reflection, I can easily forgive. In the end, it's the film's
ability to subtly convey its poetic undertones that separate it from the pack.
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