ELDORADO
Directed & Written by Bouli Lanners
Produced by Jacques-Henri
Released by Film Movement
French with English subtitles
Belgium. 80 min. Not Rated
With Bouli Lanners, Fabrice Adde, Philippe Nahon, Didier Toupy & Françoise Chichéry
 

Eldorado is Belgian writer-director Bouli Lanners’ precarious balancing act. Two loners’ lives intersect by meeting cute. They then take off on a road trip where they meet an assortment of eccentrics. Lanners could easily have fallen into the trap of portraying the main characters’ aimlessness so well that the film itself becomes pointless. But he adroitly avoids such pitfalls, notably by casting himself in the lead and by keeping the film a succinct 80 minutes long.

Lanners is Yvan, a disheveled 40-year-old vintage car dealer living by himself, who returns home one evening to find his home broken into and the would-be robber, Elie, hiding under his bed. Rather than call the police, Yvan tentatively befriends the painfully thin younger man, soon agreeing to drive Elie to his parents’ home in his beat-up Chevy. Yvan assumes Elie’s a junkie, which he denies, claiming he’s been clean for two weeks. Along the way, the men encounter people whose lives are as full of disquiet as theirs.

A burly, bearded bear of a man, Lanners plays Yvan with a slight self-consciousness, which brings a believable awkwardness to the character. His guttural speaking voice is also effective shorthand in defining this diffident loner. Paired with Lanners is wiry Fabrice Adde, who plays Elie not as a stereotypical, mannered druggie but as a confused young man whose life, until now, has been primarily purposeless. Through small increments, both chip away at the walls they’ve built up.

Because of Eldorado’s brevity, the film never goes off on tangents and introduces only a mere handful of oddballs. We meet a Good Samaritan nudist who calls himself “Alain Delon,” while another (who assists when the pair’s car breaks down) collects cars involved in fatal accidents and lovingly points out the dents.

As director, Lanners has a shrewd sense of rhythm. Just as one scene starts to go on too long, Lanners cuts away to the next, allowing the narrative to flow similarly to Yvan and Elie’s friendship: slowly but distinctly. The droll and bittersweet road trip is edited to a guitar-driven, twangy score, while Jean-Paul de Zaeytijd’s wonderfully tangy cinematography makes the Walloon plateau landscape—one of many nods in Lanners’ film to Hollywood’s great Westerns—seem simultaneously enticing and forbidding, as if teasing the men with promises unfulfilled. Kevin Filipski
May 1, 2009