By Mathilde Merouani.
This is an extract from The Hinge of a Metaphor, edited by Richard Skinner (Vanguard Editions, 2023).
The characters in The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) have fantasies. The director, Felix van Groeningen, is Belgian, the film is set in Flemish Ghent, yet in the first scene a bluegrass band sings in English. That is because Didier, the lead singer, dreams of America.
Didier’s American fantasy is at the heart of Elise’s initial attraction to him. When he first takes her home, Elise lies next to him in the orange glow of a fire and listens to him talk about J. D. Crowe and Tony Rice, and we see her wanting a man who talks so passionately about things that mean nothing to her. Later, on his bed, he tells her about the birth of bluegrass: ‘Dirt-poor fortune hunters from all over the world were there on the Appalachians on that slate that was difficult to mine, and the Spaniard had a guitar, the Italian a mandolin, the Jew a violin and the African a banjar, from which the banjo is descended.’ They sang, he tells her, in order to dream — about a promised land, about the end of their misery. Elise doesn’t listen, or listens only to his love for that dream. She watches that world on his face.
Didier has the same awe for her body: Elise is a tattoo-artist, and her skin is covered in her own drawings. She, too, deals in images. And she is happy to make that American image for him, to make the fantasy sexual, to play the pin-up girl and spread on the hood of his truck wearing nothing but a star-spangled-banner bikini. In that scene we see words tattooed on the side of her leg: ‘Second star to the right and straight on till morning.’ She doesn’t explain, but these are the directions to Neverland.
For a while, their life together looks, indeed, like something out a fantasy: they ride on horseback at sunset, shower outside surrounded by tall grass, play music at night by a bonfire. Cows bat their lashes in the mud. Nothing defines this landscape — we’re told it is Ghent but it could be Odense, or Spokane, or Nantes. Why not heaven?
Because Felix won’t let us have heaven. The film tells us, right from the beginning, specifically how that dream will shatter. After the harmonies of the band onstage come the heavy silences of the second scene: Elise and Didier’s six-year-old daughter, Maybelle, has cancer. The story is told in a non-linear way: Maybelle is ill, Maybelle is born, Elise is in the band, Elise learns how to sing, Didier watches a man attempt to revive his wife, Didier proposes to his future wife. Not in that order. It is impossible for the viewer to believe in a fantasy of the hero’s journey — to hope that after hardship comes a gratifying sense of resolution. We know too much, all the time. The broken timeline speaks to the concept of the fantasy and its impossible anchorage in time: it does not exist in the present, is in fact defined by its remoteness to the present, and cannot be realised in the future if it is to remain a fantasy.
In the hospital, people agree to bend reality for Maybelle’s sake. Elise takes Didier aside and asks him to put up a front of positivity; ‘We do our crying at home,’ she tells him. A nurse insists the child’s rucksack is actually a giant ladybird. Elise paints an animal’s face on her daughter’s, and when the doctor asks Maybelle what she is, she says she’s a tiger. The face-paint is well-done; it is easy to agree that Maybelle is a tiger. The doctor asks the child what her mother is, and she says, ‘a butterfly.’ This time, it is difficult to see: there isn’t much in the bright, random blotches of colour on Elise’s skin that recalls the shape of a butterfly. But nobody protests. It seems obvious to all that in this moment, preserving any kind of fantasy is a matter of survival. That the most important thing, sometimes, is to be able to say that the colourful amalgam of nothing is a beautiful insect.
But when do we break those fantasies? Which ones do we allow to carry on? How do we tell the fantasies that help from those that will, eventually, cause harm? Didier’s longing for America might at first seem innocent. Comical, even. Here is a Belgian singing about being ‘an old Kentucky hillbilly.’ Here is Elise proclaiming to the audience that she has country in her genes. It’s a fantasy with no real propulsion behind it — there are no references to the couple thinking, or having ever thought, of emigrating. When Didier first meets Elise, he tells her, ‘America is the best place on earth. No matter where you’re from, when you get there you can start all over again,’ and his is the glee of the child who has just been given a puppy and has yet to learn that it will die. What is this America Didier speaks of? Who, exactly, is allowed to start over in America? His America is a sound. A pretty word. It has no states, no cities, no history. His fantasy is double, his and not his, a whole nation’s already, a founding myth. A fantasy not just because it is removed from his own present life, but because it is removed from the country’s realities. The apparent harmlessness of the fantasy is a feature of its harmfulness — that a Flemish man in 2006 could be so wide-eyed about the United States of America is a testament to the effectiveness of the national narrative in distracting the world from the country’s crimes.
The undoing of Didier’s fantasy is not gradual. His fantasy is undone for him: his daughter dies. When Maybelle was alive, a doctor had told the couple the stem-cell transplant needed in the child’s treatment might mean the new cells would attack her body, which would not occur with identical stem cells. Now, his child is dead, and on television George Bush vetoes a stem-cell research bill on religious grounds. Didier lashes out. He blames his loss on religion. He blames it on Americans. Elise, impassive before he attacks her own beliefs, says, ‘Didier, it’s America. It’s allowed here, it’s just that they haven’t got that far yet.’ But it doesn’t matter, there is no rationality to his rage, and in the middle of a show he erupts again onstage, screams about the destructiveness of religious belief in the very place his fantasies were born. Didier’s violent, sudden anger is that of a man who believed so earnestly in something only to find out a crowd in the background was laughing quietly the whole time. Only to find out he was a fool. With his daughter’s death, it isn’t just his fantasy of America that is ruined, it is everything the country represented: his faith that there existed somewhere a haven for the despaired, that it was in theory possible one day to ‘start all over again.’ The target of Didier’s new rage is the notion of belief itself.
Elise can no longer withstand those outbursts. They are personal attacks, too. Because Elise has chosen to believe. A bird comes to the window of Maybelle’s old bedroom, and Elise believes the bird is her reincarnated daughter. Because birds had made a habit of dying on the family’s veranda, mistaking glass for air, Elise puts up stickers of hawks on the panes to scare them away. Didier disapproves. He says, ‘It isn’t a hawk, it’s a sticker,’ as if that was the point. He lectures his wife about her idea being nothing but an illusion, a cheap trick that will not lead the species to learning what glass is, to which Elise replies, ‘This is a solution.’ Didier, too scarred by the loss of his fantasies, can no longer see the use of a necessary illusion.
He used to be able to see it — when Maybelle was alive. A bird had died; the child had found comfort in imagining it had turned into a star. Didier told her, ‘If you want to believe the bird is a star, then it is.’ He told Elise, ‘You want to say that […] some people believe the bird has a soul that doesn’t die and goes up to heaven. That it’ll see its mummy and daddy again there and will fly around forever in a place where the sun always shines and there aren’t any windows. […] But Daddy doesn’t believe in any of that. Daddy thinks that everything just dies and stays dead. But you can’t say that,’ and Elise replied, ‘No, you can’t say that Didier.’ Didier struggled, but he understood that at this time, reassuring his sick daughter was more important than establishing his certainties.
Didier doesn’t extend the same compassion to his wife. He shouts at her that she’s gone crazy because she believes her dead child is a bird — Elise packs a bag and leaves. The problem, here, is not that she believes and he doesn’t, but that he doesn’t allow her to have her fantasy when she needs it most. They’re apart, for a while, and then Didier goes to see Elise at the tattoo parlour where she sleeps, and there is something sweet in the scene. They look at each other like two people who know exactly the shape of the other’s suffering. It seems like Didier might even apologise. Then, Elise says she changed her name. Her new name is ‘Alabama.’ She borrowed his old fantasy for hers; she says she was inspired by Native Americans’ customs, that a person can mark a new phase of their life in that way. Once again, Didier reacts with un-nuanced anger. He calls her decision silly. She says, ‘Just call me Alabama, ok?’, and it is not a plea but a challenge. This is not about her being called Alabama; she only wants to see if he’ll let her need something he doesn’t understand.
The bluegrass band plays one last show, though they do not yet know it is the last. Elise avoids Didier onstage. Won’t look at him. He holds out his hand; they are singing the words, If I needed you, would you come to me? Would you come to me for to ease my pain? Didier has not eased her pain. She doesn’t take his hand. She stares ahead. Her voice is flat; she’s already tried too many times. Then, her voice is slowly full again: she is singing ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ while Didier mouths the words in the wings. Something breaks in her voice towards the end when she sings, I’m going there to see my mother. Elise has made her decision: in this song, because the film makes every moment contain its past and its inevitable future, she is already dead. She has taken the pills. She has gone over Jordan. The scene announces itself, in the same way that the cadence at the end of the opening song makes the very first scene feel like an ending, in the same way that the Peter-Pan reference announces not just fantasies but a child not growing up. I know some people will find this excessive – first the daughter, then the mother? Will no one be saved? I think it simply makes sense. The world has always felt most unbearable to me when I had nothing to dream about. Elise is not able to remove herself from the real in thought, so she does it the only way she can: with her body.
Didier has one last chance. Elise says, ‘If I want to believe Maybelle is a star up in the sky, I will. If I want to believe she’s a bird that perches on our window sill, or a butterfly that sits on my shoulder…’ Didier interrupts her. He screams, ‘She’s dead, she’s gone! She’s not here anymore.’ The most terrible thing Didier does is have contempt for Elise’s hopes. And I understand his impulse, too. I understand that for him, to be constantly reminded that the possibility of going back and retrieving what is lost (this looping the film’s construction offers and precludes at the same time) will never materialise is just as unbearable. But while he’s shouting, I want to reach out, and say, let her have it. Let her have her fantasy. She needs it too much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mathilde Merouani’s writing has appeared in Joyland, The Common and Fugue. She won the 2021 Open Border Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. Her translations of Michel Butor’s essays have been published by Vanguard Editions.
