JCVD (2008)

The career of Jean-Claude Van Damme, considered as a specimen, produces a 2008 Belgian production in which the actor plays a version of himself: broke, embroiled in a custody fight, reduced to roles that Steven Seagal has already turned down. It is a satire of celebrity and its machinery, and it is content to remain one. The Brussels ensemble is drawn naturally from the city's own demography, and the film never pauses to remark on the fact. The custody dispute supplies stakes, and a daughter supplies pain, but the material stops at the personal. No argument about fathers, courts, or gender is mounted.

The heist structure gives the film its engine: a post office robbery, a mistaken identity, a police cordon, a media circus parked outside a video store. The targets are the press, the film industry, and the man himself. Money appears as an immediate problem, a wire transfer that never arrives, a $465,000 demand routed to the law firm handling his case. Nobody proposes that the wealthy be devoured. The wealthy here is a fading action star who cannot pay his attorney. Race and sexuality exist in the frame as ordinary facts of Schaerbeek life and are never recruited as subjects. The climate goes unmentioned, as it should.

The celebrated six-minute monologue, delivered in a single take with the camera lifted above the set, is addressed to the audience, or to God, or to both. It is confessional, not instructive. Drug use, failed marriages, and the fear of dying absurdly in a hostage standoff are offered without a lesson attached. The film's cultural awareness belongs to an older, sadder tradition: a man examining his own ruin while the camera refuses to look away. Critics admired him for saying worse things about himself than they would have dared. On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the entries are blank. We record the result without complaint. Some vintages are not built for the cellar.