Well, Chuck, he’s a boorish lout who drives a truck and wants to avoid involving the police when he has a fender bender, and she’s a mother of three who’s letting her husband sleep with someone half his age because she’s sure he’ll come back eventually. Let’s give a warm welcome to Johnny and Matty!
Moscow, Belgium is the story of two people who have been beaten almost all the way down, either by the world or by their own choices - you make the call! Of course, there’s an irony here, too, of sorts: if not for those choices that have beaten them down, their initial interaction after a parkig lot fender bender could not have happened the way that it did, and they never would have had the chance to know each other the way they wound up knowing each other.
Is it love, ultimately? Again...you make the call! It looks like it at first, then there’s a blowout, and sort of a reconciliation by the end. But hey now, wait, damnit, you’re spoiling it! Maybe, but you’re not going to watch it anyway. There are exactly two people I know of who read this blog that might wind up seeing this picture - and I’d say that the chances are about 75% that one or both of them will have seen it by the time they read this post. Most of the rest will not have heard of it - and probably wouldn’t see it anyway, ‘cause it ain’t in American.
Doesn’t need to be, either, and not because love is universal, or any fluffy romantic nonsense like that. For the first couple of acts, you can pretty much get what they’re saying just by watching the way they say it. No one’s trying to forge peace in the Middle East or make sense of a government bailout program here - it’s just two people who meet by chance, in a way that is not conducive to a budding friendship, never mind the possibility of eventually bumping uglies.
And yet that friendship manages to emerge, and it does so because the two characters are lonely, trapped in their own lives, so far removed from the dreams of youth that they’ve not only put their dreams on the back burner, they’ve turned off the stove and don’t even bother getting up to go into the kitchen very much anymore. You can see that loneliness in their eyes, in the crushing air of fatigue that they wear like an IV drip, in the tedium of daily tasks repeated over and over and over again.
There’s nothing special about watching two unlikely friends take the first steps in that unlikely friendship. What’s unique about Moscow, Belgium is its authenticity. Matty screams at Johnny in the parking lot after the fender bender because she’s got a lot of pent-up frustration, and when she tells him that he’s blind to the world up there in the cab of his truck, she means it one way and he takes it in a completely different way. Later, he shows up at her apartment to fix the trunk of her car, and her kids shout down from the balcony, aganist mom’s wishes, to tell him which car is hers. Matty wants nothing to do with him, but he manages to fix her car - so she invites him to stay for dinner. As the film progresses, the excellent screenplay fills in the details as the characters get to know each other.
Only the climactic scene in (and then out in front of) the pub near the end of the film feels forced and a little convoluted; everything else is organic and true (and by the end, you can almost imagine that the convoluted pub scene might just have been necessary after all), bolstered by excellent pacing in the direction and tremendous acting by Barbara Sarafian and Jurgen Delnaet, as Matty and Johnny, respectively.
Moscow, Belgium is not an especially challenging film, but it is an immensely satisfying one, a real art film in what is, anymore, a sea of mid-major adaptations of obscure novels. It’s beautiful and charming in such amazingly unexpected ways. Don’t let the goofy-looking one-sheet fool you (that is not, in fact, Chris Elliott with red hair) - this one’s a winner.
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