The translation of trauma to the big screen is a risky act, national trauma even more so. How does one represent such events when the wounds of collective memory still sting? Fabrice Du Welz’s latest feature Maldoror takes the Marc Dutroux case—a serial killer who raped and murdered several young girls in the Belgian town of Marchienne-au-Pont in the late 90s—and uses it as fodder to fabricate a procedural thriller.
The primary driving force behind the investigation is the fictional Paul Chartier (played by Anthony Bajon), a fresh-faced gendarme allergic to authority with an unbendable sense of justice. Enraged by the impossible bureaucracy of the Belgian police system and its dearth of interest in locating the missing girls, he goes increasingly rogue, converting his newlywed house into a full-blown red string conspiracy theory collage. This descent into madness requires some heavy suspension of disbelief. Bajon gives a decent performance but his babyface brings up some casting doubts; the insanity of the Kubrick stare doesn’t land when you look like a 14-year-old boy.
Maldoror is pleasurably predictable, a typical crime drama replete with tropes like corrupt officials, a troubled past Chartier can’t run from, and a neglected wife who’s desperate for him to stop ruining his life. Yet despite its bloated runtime, the film is worryingly watchable. It never lives up to its namesake (a 19th century French poem by the Comte de Lautréamont that celebrates evil), lacking the bite of the truly nasty, which is surprising considering Du Welz’s association with the new French extremity in the 00s. The film is singularly concerned with Chartier’s arc from naive cop to unhinged dissident at the expense of severing us from the discomfort of its true crime. While it mercifully avoids showing any child abuse directly, Maldoror misplaces all its violence into its action sequences, which are not so squirm-inducing as they are blandly entertaining.
At the time of the killings, there were mass protests decrying the negligence of the Belgian state, with citizens organising to find the girls themselves. There are brief nods to this in the film through flashes of TV footage, accompanied by a shot of a torn Belgian flag flapping wearily in the wind. Unfortunately, Maldoror is so obsessed with its fictional protagonist that its clumsy attempts of political commentary about the real world stumble and flail. Du Welz explains in an interview that his goal was to offer “a sort of catharsis” for Belgian viewers but it’s unclear how the spectacle of bombastic gunfights might do that.
Narrativizing such a sensitive national tragedy has the potential to, at the very least, be ‘important’, documenting the failures of the state and conveying the utter horror of the crimes. Yet Maldoror exploits this true story only to become a moderate action thriller, with nothing of interest to say about its source material.