If Blue Valentine and Antichrist had a child, The Broken Circle Breakdown would be it – without the clitorectomy and preternatural, talking fox of course. Regardless, this Belgian progeny investigates the various impacts parents experience after losing a child.
Early on, we meet the adorable Maybelle and her parents, Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh). Diagnosed with cancer, she continues to smile and laugh, unaware of the severity of the disease that eats away at her insides. The doctor speaks with her jovially about Prince Chemo battling the evil cancer, and we too find hope in Maybelle’s smile. In a way, we forget about the most likely outcome – perhaps in part because children are not supposed to perish on film. Instead, they are supposed to fight through peril. Here, the child does not.
Before Maybelle’s death, the film flashes back seven years to Elise and Didier’s first physical encounter. Didier is an atheist who lives in a trailer while rehabbing a house. He drinks a fair amount and sings in a bluegrass band. Elise has a number of tattoos, works in a tattoo parlor and provides realism to Didier’s romanticism.
Together, they click, and soon Elise becomes pregnant. Didier’s first reaction is one of anger, accusing Elise of knowing too long before telling him (presumably to trap him into keeping the child) and lamenting that he doesn’t want “to make decisions about someone else’s life.” But soon after he speeds away in his truck, he returns with a wealth of lumber and furniture to finish the house and construct the child’s eventual room.
There’s a romance that persists through Elise’s pregnancy, through Maybelle’s young life and up until her death. At this point, their present begins to alter the memories of their past. In a rather explosive moment shortly after Maybelle’s passing, Elise and Dieder engage in an argument of deductive guilt where each pummels the other with past occurrences that might have contributes to Maybelle contracting cancer. Didier suggests perhaps the house wasn’t clean enough, or Maybelle didn’t eat the right foods. Intentional or not, Didier’s comments irk Elise who was the one that most often cleaned the home and prepared the food. In turn, Elise accuses Didier of being an alcoholic whose jaundice prevented Elise from breastfeeding to the extent she wanted and of having more cancer in his family history.
Each verbal stab from the husband and wife is both relevant and overblown. The hatred is palatable, but the logic doesn’t always work. At the same time, it suggests that the child was an adhesive to a relationship that most likely would not have lasted had Elise not been pregnant. After Maybelle’s death, Elise and Didier attempt to rekindle their physical relationship, but this ends in tears. Whereas sex was once physically pleasurable, it becomes emotionally painful. Similarly, the automobile that symbolized their sexuality in the past – many of their encounters took place in a cramped back seat – it becomes a signifier of death and anger when Elise has a full breakdown, pounding on the wheel and crying her eyes out.
But, aside from the physical connection, their ideologies are opposite.
As an atheist, Didier has difficulty explaining to Maybelle what happens when someone or something dies. The conversation arises when a bird flies into the glass “teranda” outside of their home. In this moment, Didier is forced to explain death and the potential afterlife to someone who is so statistically close to death, while trying not to completely frighten his daughter with the thought of eventual nothingness. However, when Maybelle dies, Didier is unable to find the same balance with Elise, who finds comfort in the notion that Maybelle is a star in the sky or reincarnated into a bird.
Here, Didier’s pain makes him much more obdurate than we thought possible – while we begin to understand that Elise is much more about moving on. The tattoos on her body are attractive and ironic. They are simultaneously a testament to permanence (in that they’re tattoos), but temporal in that many of them are cover ups of previous tattoos – mostly names of former boyfriends. In this manner, Elise can change identity and ideology within moments. In contrast, Didier is unable to let go of his fervent ideologies that culminate in diatribes about George W. Bush, stem-cell research, and religious fanaticism. Sprinkled throughout are broadcasts about the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, an event that impelled decisions and actions that divided much of the country as time passed.
And, in the end, The Broken Circle Breakdown offers a commentary on the impact of tragedy and our reactions to these tragedies when placed in the framework of our ideologies.
