12/09/2012 - With Little Glory, Vincent Lannoo adds another string to his bow as a director of many genres, and offers an unexpected social interpretation of the American teen movie

Vincent Lannoo had made us used to something completely different: a world of tragic farce, scathing parodies, boastful buffoons, and far-from-glorious losers. Little Glory [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the melancholy chronicles of a teenager being pushed around at the heart of a rather un-cinematographic America, is at first quite surprising.

An angle lookalike, a sort of ghostly echo of James Dean, crosses the screen, imprinting the tale with its lazy rhythm, almost weighed down by a daily routine made up of repetitions. Shawn has dropped out of school and left his job. He plays video games and hangs out with guys who are not so clever and quite violent. He lives with his father, a construction worker with a soft spot for alcohol, and his little sister who is 10 years younger than him. Their mother has just died, and despite his airs of confidence, Shawn doesn’t know how to cut this cord that was ripped too early. After one ladder and one beer too many, the father has a fatal fall. Shawn accepts his tired father's final resignation from life with fatalism, but does not understand immediately the extent of the new responsibilities that have now been passed down to him. He could become his little sister’s guardian. Shawn and his sister, who will help each other to grow up, will mostly learn that, sometimes, making the right choice is to be able to give up.

Little Glory was originally a screenplay by François Verjeans. Vincent Lannoo and John Engels, in charge of production, got their hands on it to transpose it to the other side of the Atlantic, in an America that we rarely see on screen, one that is neither poor, nor rich, not that of the suburban middle class, nor that seething city centres or white trash trailer parks. It's a daring bet that has added an extra stone to the diversity of Belgian cinema. Produced by Left Field Ventures, with the support of the CCA, Wallimage, and the Tax Shelter (uFund), the film has been released on 6 copies by Artebis.

A Belgian documentary is also out this week, Il a plu sur le grand paysage (lit. "It rained on the great landscape") by Jean-Jacques Andrien.

(Translated from French)