The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)

A Belgian romantic drama from 2012, following two bluegrass musicians in Ghent as they fall in love, have a daughter, and then lose her to cancer. The film is structured in the non-linear fashion that was fashionable at the time, cutting between courtship and collapse until the two timelines bleed into each other. The soundtrack is performed live by the cast, and it is genuinely good. This is a film about grief, and it conducts itself with the grim sincerity that grief demands. On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, it is almost aggressively uninterested. The cast is uniformly white Flemish, and the film never once glances at the question of who is or is not on screen. Race, sexuality, class, the environment, and the body as a political subject are simply not on the agenda. The story is a domestic tragedy, and it stays domestic.

Where the film does stir is in its second half, when Didier retreats into militant atheism and Elise into reincarnation and spiritualism. The script threads in George W. Bush's 2001 restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and the couple's arguments brush against creationism and scientific funding. It reads as period detail and marital friction, not as a sermon. Nobody turns to the camera. Nobody learns a lesson about the correct position. The debate is staged as character, and the film trusts us to draw our own conclusions, which is a courtesy increasingly rare in the current climate.

Elise is a substantial central figure with a trade, a voice, and a will of her own, though the film has no thesis about gender to offer and no interest in constructing one. What we have here is a well-made European tragedy about two people who cannot survive the same loss in the same way. It asks nothing of the audience except attention. That, at least, is something.