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A poor wayfaring stranger
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)
their little daughter Maybelle (named after Johnny Cash's sister-in-law) dies of lukaemia. Maybelle's mother subsequently kills herself, but because of her daughter's death rather than because of the break-up.
We almost didn't go and see it originally because the reviews mentioned that the child dies and my mind immediately went to abduction/murder, but then I happened to hear a review on the radio that put my mind to rest that it wasn't that, and also played a snippet of one of the songs on the soundtrack, "Country in my genes". That song hooked me. I had had zero interest in bluegrass before and went back to having zero interest again afterwards, but in the context of the film, the songs are simply amazing. So I heard "Country in my genes" and decided we should go. We were, quite simply, blown away. The film tells the story by interspersing the joyous, fabulously non-conforming early part of the relationship with the tragic events that follow Maybelle's diagnosis, intercut in turn with the band playing bluegrass songs, sometimes on stage, sometimes in private. The music is phenomenal (the cast subsequently had a successful musical career as a bluegrass band, and may still for all I know) and while the events of the story imbue the songs with a psychological and narrative sub-text, the songs in turn give the story a spiritual dimension, being largely concerned with life, death and the afterlife, in a way that both links in with and broadens the specific agony of the human condition that the characters are going through. Maybelle's illness and death ring absolutely true. There's no false sentiment, no unnecessary piling on of pain. It feels like this is what it would be like to lose a child to illness and hence is almost unendurable, and yet you can't look away because it's so well done. Afterwards, her parents' relationship disintegrates, to a large extent because their ways of coping with grief are incompatible - Maybelle's mother, already spiritually inclined, gets positively woo-wooish, to the extent of looking for reincarnations of her daughter in random birds; her rigorously rational atheist father starts ranting from the concert stage about George W. Bush killing his daughter by preventing embryo research that could have saved her life. It's beautifully done, beautifully acted, beautifully told and, as mentioned above, desperately, desperately sad. You can see why it would be a hard sell, and yet I don't regret for a moment having watched it. I didn't even regret it while I was watching it. It's just that it's taken me eight years to start thinking I would quite like to watch it again.
Here they are performing If I Needed You, long enough after the loss of Maybelle to go back on stage. You can see, I think, a lot of what's going on with them psychologically even without having seen the rest of the film:
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)
their little daughter Maybelle (named after Johnny Cash's sister-in-law) dies of lukaemia. Maybelle's mother subsequently kills herself, but because of her daughter's death rather than because of the break-up.
We almost didn't go and see it originally because the reviews mentioned that the child dies and my mind immediately went to abduction/murder, but then I happened to hear a review on the radio that put my mind to rest that it wasn't that, and also played a snippet of one of the songs on the soundtrack, "Country in my genes". That song hooked me. I had had zero interest in bluegrass before and went back to having zero interest again afterwards, but in the context of the film, the songs are simply amazing. So I heard "Country in my genes" and decided we should go. We were, quite simply, blown away. The film tells the story by interspersing the joyous, fabulously non-conforming early part of the relationship with the tragic events that follow Maybelle's diagnosis, intercut in turn with the band playing bluegrass songs, sometimes on stage, sometimes in private. The music is phenomenal (the cast subsequently had a successful musical career as a bluegrass band, and may still for all I know) and while the events of the story imbue the songs with a psychological and narrative sub-text, the songs in turn give the story a spiritual dimension, being largely concerned with life, death and the afterlife, in a way that both links in with and broadens the specific agony of the human condition that the characters are going through. Maybelle's illness and death ring absolutely true. There's no false sentiment, no unnecessary piling on of pain. It feels like this is what it would be like to lose a child to illness and hence is almost unendurable, and yet you can't look away because it's so well done. Afterwards, her parents' relationship disintegrates, to a large extent because their ways of coping with grief are incompatible - Maybelle's mother, already spiritually inclined, gets positively woo-wooish, to the extent of looking for reincarnations of her daughter in random birds; her rigorously rational atheist father starts ranting from the concert stage about George W. Bush killing his daughter by preventing embryo research that could have saved her life. It's beautifully done, beautifully acted, beautifully told and, as mentioned above, desperately, desperately sad. You can see why it would be a hard sell, and yet I don't regret for a moment having watched it. I didn't even regret it while I was watching it. It's just that it's taken me eight years to start thinking I would quite like to watch it again.
Here they are performing If I Needed You, long enough after the loss of Maybelle to go back on stage. You can see, I think, a lot of what's going on with them psychologically even without having seen the rest of the film: