Klara's cinema

Although this blog makes it look otherwise, I do go very often to movies outside of the Venice Film Festival. Year 2026 is particularly prolific in that sense as I am on a career break and, living in the city centre, I have access to many movie theatres that are less than 20mins walk away from my house. I am thus currently on a film marathon during which I have absorbed many movies including (but not limited to) “Hamnet”, “Le Chant des oiseaux”, “Calle Malaga”, “O Agente Segreto”, “No Other Choice” (we missed that one in Venice, actually), “Marty Supreme”, “A Private Life” etc.

However, the past two weeks deserve a specific study on this blog as they can give you a hint on how movies can have a strong impact on your (at least my) daily life, whether you want it or not. And that’s where I get into my complex relationship with Belgium’s Mr Cinema. Belgium is a small country. It has a quite vivid but limited cultural scene. Money is definitely an issue, even more so in the French part of the country whose budget is scarce (not to say tragic). And where do you cut first, when there is no money? Well culture, obviously. Though I would tend to argue that this is the stupidest decision to take – why on earth would you silence one of the only universal languages? But this is not the purpose of this post.

Anyhow, in this small cultural microcosm, there is limited space. Meaning that in terms of movie critics, you always end up referring to the same few guys/ladies. This includes Belgium’s Mr Cinema, active on the French speaking public radio and TV. As a movie lover, that guy has been in my life almost since I was born and at least since I started going to the movies. Actually, before him, there was another nice dude with cool glasses. Anyways, once per week, French speaking Belgium (the part that is at least slightly interested in culture) listens to Mr Cinema’s opinion on the movies that are about to be released. I am one of those.

Since a few years, I find myself more and more often in disagreement with our Mr Cinema. Which, theoretically, should be perfectly fine, as culture is a question of sensitivity and sensitivities on our planet are very diverse. You should ask my friends who never understood why Rothko’s paintings make me cry. How many times do I lovingly (and the word “lovingly” is key here) hear them making fun of me and my love for “coloured squares”. And me arguing back that “THESE ARE NOT SQUARES!”.

So me being in disagreement with Mr cinema should not be a problem. My problem appears however when such statements as “it’s already been many years that Jim Jarmusch has got nothing left to say” are made (and, believe me, there are many of that kind lately). This leaves me, let’s say, quite sceptical. Since when are such categoric statements made about something that, in the end, is so very much personal? OK, dude, Jarmusch doesn’t work for you anymore. Perfectly fine with me. But he obviously still manages to touch many people (me included) on this planet.

Problem is, in our little country, Mr Cinema’s opinions have quite an impact. He thus has a significant power in his hands. I wouldn’t say it’s life or death of some movies’ successes – this would be giving him too much importance – but there is at least some influence on it. I understand that destroying some movies can be fun (even I, sometimes, cannot refrain), but in the end, isn’t it only your opinion? Your expert opinion, of course. But still the subjective opinion of one single human being. Once in a while we should be reminded that we are all insignificant and temporary passengers on this earth.

This gets me to my latest “me don’t likey” moment with Belgium’s Mr Cinema, which is an actually funny one. Since there were already quite a few disagreements in the past years, I usually tend to add some reads to Mr Cinema’s weekly statements, just to see if others agree with him or have different opinions. In last week’s case, I just got convinced to see this movie based on Mr Cinema’s positive opinion combined with the fact that its main actress got nominated for this year’s best leading actress Oscar. This seemed like solid enough ground to take the risk despite the film’s hard to digest title “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You”.

Now. Let’s face it. Most probably it was not the right movie at the right time for me. This time it actually felt more like torture than cinema. And I am very much aware that this is exactly linked to my personal sensitivities and that hysteria and me we do not work well together. If I had to compare, I would say that my reaction was similar to the one I had when I had to suffer through Aronofsky’s “Mother!”. Basically I wanted to get out after 10mins. I am not going to dwell on the content of the film but let’s just say that everything that can go wrong goes wrong and that you basically watch a woman struggle on her own for an hour and a half without any hope for improvement.

I cannot explain why I suffered through the entire film despite of how it made me feel (me, personally, as one small insignificant passenger on planet earth). The result of this decision however being that when I got out of the movie theatre, I was absolutely infuriated. I felt such anger that I had to take a one hour walk during which I got even more angry. First at myself (for staying), then at the Director (“what does such a movie bring to my life?”) and finally and principally at Mr Cinema (who said that it’s more worth watching than Jarmusch’ latest). The anger kept growing. It prevented me from sleeping. Not just one night, but two.

After night one, a friend called for a random and innocent chat. The poor thing witnessed another outburst of anger on the phone – I would say that the morning after was the one of my “anger peak”. I must have sounded absolutely outraged (not to say the forbidden word, hysterical) and heard myself shouting things like “Who the fuck does this dude (meaning Mr Cinema) thinks he is?!”; I as well claimed that the dude should pay for the yoga class I was about to attend because I needed to release the stress and anger that he had caused in my life. Overreacting? I don’t know what you are talking about 😊

It took me two days to recover.

This week, I got back to a neutral relationship with Belgium’s Mr Cinema. He indeed very much recommended a pretty movie to watch (Gianolli’s “Les rayons et les ombres”), which I found very pretty to watch as well. So all’s well that ends well. No one got hurt. Although Belgium’s Mr Cinema should feel very lucky that he did not cross my path last week 😂