Bullhead (2011)

I don't recall how I learned of this Belgian pic; probably Netflix recommended it. If so, it's kind of ironic that I almost dropped the item from the queue due to a moderately low Netflix estimation of how I'd rate it. Still, it had an Academy Best Foreign Language Film nod among other honors.

You may not have heard about mob activity involving the trade distribution and hormone injection of livestock. The story is inspired by the RL murder of a meat inspector. Suspected of the fictionalized similar murder is protagonist Jacky (only once called by the titular insult), a thug who takes some of the same drugs as the cattle. Deuteragonist Diederik used to be his closest friend and still makes some friendly overtures, but now he's reluctantly serving as a police informant....

Jacky does have a partial excuse for the drugs. We see in flashbacks that as a preteen, he got effectively castrated by a mobster's unhinged teen son, Bruno, whose sister Lucia he wanted. His parents agreed to put him on testosterone supplements, ostensibly so he'd go through puberty, but also because they were afraid he'd turn gay. By the present, he's overcompensating, being brawnier than anyone else around. (Actor Matthias Schoenaerts did an impressive physical transformation for the role, supposedly just by diet and exercise rather than drugs.)

Few fictional thugs have elicited my sympathy more easily than Jacky. That one act by a villain too protected for easy vengeance must have shaped the rest of his life. His brother had to defend him a lot. He still gets PTSD moments remarkably often. Other criminals have their suspicions when he won't join them at brothels. And neither Lucia nor Bruno is gone from his present for good yet.

About that LGBT tag: No, the homophobic nightmare of Jacky's parents didn't come true. Diederik's the gay one, altho, in keeping with his secrecy and caution (cowardice?) in other matters, he doesn't reveal this to anyone who isn't also gay. It's not important to the plot, just a piece of character development that writer-director Michaël R. Roskam says he added as a afterthought.

Comic relief mainly takes the form of two mechanics assigned to make a car "disappear." When they find evidence of its use in a crime, they have different ideas of how best to handle the situation. Neither, of course, is all that smart. Roskam took inspiration from the two buffoons in The Hidden Fortress, but I'd just as soon expect them from a Guy Ritchie caper.

The Belgian setting is not particularly essential. We do get a bit of mutual carping between speakers of different languages. I had assumed only Flemish and French, but it turns out that most of the dialog is in a Limburgish dialect whose Wikipedia entry does not appear in English.

Roskam intended noir, so I added that tag. The opening narration does present a highly negative worldview, with more swearing than a Golden Age film noir would afford. It's hardly a spoiler to say the ending isn't exactly happy.

Overall, I find the movie OK. It's not big on powerful moments to my mind, but for Roskam's first effort, it's pretty impressive. I'd be willing to give him another shot -- no pun intended.