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Yesterday I started reading a book, which was prefaced with the lyrics to a song that began "I am a poor wayfaring stranger..." As I read the lines, which I didn't initially recognise, a tune popped into my head, a tune that was clearly the proper tune for these particular lyrics, and for a moment I was thoroughly bewildered as to how I could know the tune when I didn't know the song. And then The Broken Circle Breakdown exploded into my memory and I remembered the songs, I remembered ALL the songs, and I spent most of this morning greedily hunting them down on Youtube and wallowing in them. And I slowly came to the realisation that enough time had passed that I could face watching it again. More than that, I actively wanted to.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is a Belgian film that came out in 2012 and is described by the IMDB as follows: "An intensely moving portrait of a relationship from beginning to end, propelled by a soundtrack of foot-stomping bluegrass, The Broken Circle Breakdown is a romantic melodrama of the highest order." Well, that's one way of putting it. "Of the highest order" is certainly correct - the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but was up against Michael Haneke's Amour - but rather than "intensely moving" I would call it desperately, desperately sad. It's the saddest film I've ever seen. Even sadder than Amour. As Amour is about an old man deciding to kill his beloved wife after she has a stroke, you can see that this is very sad indeed. When we saw The Broken Circle Breakdown at the cinema, we felt entirely unable to recommend it to any of our friends, even though it's extraordinarily good, because it's so bloody sad we were afraid they would never forgive us. I did eventually recommend it to my eldest daughter when it cropped up on Nextflix; she watched it once, wept buckets, said it was wonderful and she would never, ever be able to watch it again.

It started life as a play called The Cover-Ups of Alabama, which isn't a traditional play (having just seen The Boys in the Band, whose theatrical origins as a Well-Made Play are creakily apparent, I feel this is an important point to make) but one that uses narration as well as dialogue and jumps about in time and space, with the songs providing the emotional backbone of the story. It was written by the lead actors (the female lead got dumped for a more photogenic actress when it came to casting the film; the male lead was retained, possibly because the musical input came primarily from him - he DJs a very niche but successful bluegrass radio show - but also because beauty is considered less important in a male lead. An oil painting he ain't) and was performed in odd settings like deconsecrated churches. I say all this to make it clear that, despite the double standards in beauty, this is a story that really matters to the people telling it, and that they are people who care about things like art and truth, and all of this shows in the final product.

So, the story: two Belgians, a tattoo artist and a bluegrass musician with an obsession with the USA, meet, fall in love, are about as successful as a bluegrass band in Belgium can possibly be, and then go through an agonising break-up after (here be SPOILERS)
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