04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: We met with the Belgian filmmaker who’s presenting a family portrait morphing into an angst-ridden detective film, inspired by the criminal case which saw his homeland implode

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

Fabrice Du Welz is back with Maldoror [+see also:
film review
interview: Fabrice Du Welz
film profile], a film presented in a world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, which sees the director drawing powerfully on a painful chapter in contemporary Belgian history whilst also changing gear to offer up a naturalistic fresco which slowly morphs into a darker than dark thriller.

Cineuropa: How did the project come about?
Fabrice Du Welz: It’s a film that I’d been trying to make for a long time. To begin with, when I said I wanted to make a film about the Dutroux case, I felt a lot of hostility, like it was a sacred subject which no-one could touch. I experienced two shocks. First off, an aesthetic shock from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In my mind, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece; that film helped me understand that with faith and the tools of filmmaking, you can do anything. He takes a terrible story, which signalled a real paradigm shift in American history, and turns it into a reconciliation film. I was also obsessed with a real anecdote from the case, which we were told about at the time, where a police officer went down into Dutroux’s cellar a year before he was arrested and heard children’s voices, but no-one listened to him. For years, I’ve wondered how the man coped when he was told he almost saved those children. What a crushing moral dilemma. How do you live or survive with guilt? That’s what gave me my viewpoint for the film, an inspired young police officer who desperately wants to do good but who has to examine his own responsibility in the face of evil. That moral intersection really interested me.

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Maldoror marks a break with your previous films. You adopt an almost naturalistic approach for the first time.
We did a lot of research. The context had to be unstoppable, precise and accurate. That ultra-realistic approach was a key element for me. I grew up in Brussels, I was affected by the Dutroux case, but not like people in Charleroi were. I spent a lot of time there, scouting the location, and I noticed that people were still crushed by the case. There’s a kind of shame, it’s like a ghost that still looms over them. We were made to believe that justice had been served, but it hadn’t. I wanted to make a film about Charleroi, about its economic, social and moral deprivation. About the fact that this town was abandoned, and that these events left the town with a gaping hole inside of it. That was why I wanted it to be authentic on a human scale, but also full of humanity. Given that we’re talking about evil - practically metaphysical evil - we needed a counterpoint, and that’s what I think the family saga side of things brings to the film, the trajectory of the character whose mother-in-law takes him into the Sicilian community, where he encounters genuine humanity, real solidarity, empathy. The work we did in Marcinelle with actors, who we found during a wild casting process, playing various members of this community changed a lot for me. I wanted to shake off any artifices I might have used in my previous films. The idea was to make the film totally accessible. For the film to be as open as possible, because I feel the subject-matter is important and it goes beyond me. I invested a great deal in the character of Paul, who’s brilliantly carried by Anthony Bajon. I shared his stupefaction at the world. When I was 20, I thought the adult world was an ordered world where people could distinguish between good and bad. But the Dutroux case is extremely murky. My screenwriter and I worked hard to make a film that we felt would be as fair as possible. Especially in the final third, which is a kind of alternate history where we reinvent what has been stolen from us: a sense of justice.

How do you take the collective figure of a monster, like Dutroux, and turn him into a fictional character?
We had to portray a monster that everyone had in their minds. I’m a great admirer of Sergi Lopez; I liked the fact that, as a Spanish actor, he wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the character in the same way that a Belgian would. We imagined a gang of scumbags around him, who had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre side to them, like rednecks. It was crucial, in our minds, that we stayed outside of the cellar, that we didn’t depict the parents or the children. It was a dogma for us; we didn’t want to slide into sensationalism or show poor taste.

(Translated from French)