Man Bites Dog (1992) Review
8/10
Ben kills a woman on a train in the opening minutes and then explains to the crew how to weight a body correctly, distinguishing between the ballast required for an adult, a child and a dwarf. He’s engaging company. The crew keep filming.
The 8 is for a satire that never once steps outside itself to reassure the audience. It’s presented entirely as the finished documentary, in black and white, with no framing, no commentary and no point at which anybody says this is wrong. It’s also very funny for about forty minutes and then stops being funny in a way that’s deliberate and extremely uncomfortable. That’s the entire design.
This film got me laughing at a murderer and then made me pay for every laugh, and I respect it enormously for that trick. I’d never call it pleasant. What holds it just short of a 9 for me is how punishing the second half is to sit through, even though I understand the film needs it to hurt that much.
The Crew Are the Subject
Ben is the person being filmed. The film is about the people filming him, and the distinction separates this from everything else on this page.
The crew are also broke. The film establishes it early and never lets it go. They have no funding, the equipment is borrowed, and the man they’re documenting solves every practical problem they have.
The progression is precise. They observe. They accept meals. They accept money when their funding runs out. That comes from his victims. They hold a light. They help move a body. Each step is small and each one follows reasonably from the last.
By the midpoint the sound recordist is dead, replaced, and the new man is doing the same job. The crew have become participants and nobody has made a decision to become one. The sound recordist dying and simply being replaced is the detail that chills me most. The film barely pauses, the new man takes over the job, and I caught myself shrugging right along with the crew. That’s the film’s argument. Nobody involved chose this, they simply proceeded, and the mechanism by which observation turns into complicity is a sequence of unremarkable moments.
Complicity is built from reasonable steps, never from a decision. If your character crosses a line in one scene, the reader won’t believe it. Break the crossing into six unremarkable increments and the reader will accept each one. The person holding the camera is a character. Any framing device has an operator, and making them visible turns a story about an event into a story about its transmission.
Track what your observer gains. Meals, money, access and safety, and each acceptance is a knot the reader watches being tied.
It Is Funny First
Benoit Poelvoorde is charming in a way that’s essential and difficult to describe. Ben talks constantly, has opinions about architecture and poetry, visits his parents, and performs a song about pigeons.
The parents are the detail that does the most work. They’re Poelvoorde’s real grandmother and family, filmed in a real house, speaking about their son with the mild bafflement of people who haven’t seen him in a while and who would like it very much if he’d make the effort to come and visit them a good deal more often than he does.
The parents are my favorite thing in the film. Watching Poelvoorde’s real family talk about their son with mild bafflement, while we know exactly what he does all day, is funnier and sadder than any scripted joke in the picture.
The comedy is real and the film needs it to be. An audience that’s laughing has already agreed to the crew’s position: this man is interesting company and the filming is worth continuing.
The tonal turn happens in one scene and the film doesn’t signal it. A sequence in a house, involving a family. That isn’t funny at all and the film presents it in exactly the same tone as everything preceding it. Nothing changes about how the film is made. What changes is what it’s filming.
After that the comedy continues intermittently and the audience can no longer accept it. That’s the trap closing. The film is behaving identically and the viewer has stopped being able to.
The mechanism is the same one Henry uses from the other direction. That film gives the audience no comfortable position at any point, and this one gives them a very comfortable position for forty minutes and then charges them for it.
The Assault Sequence
There’s a scene in the second half involving a couple in their home, which the crew participate in, and it’s among the most difficult things in any film I’ve written about here.
I’m not going to describe it. What matters for a review is the construction: the sequence is long, is filmed continuously, involves the crew directly, and is followed by a scene of everybody eating and drinking together.
The pairing is the point. A film that cut away and then resumed elsewhere would be sparing the audience, and a film that shows the meal afterward is establishing that nothing has changed for the people involved. Several members of the production have discussed the difficulty of making it and the criticism it drew, and the film has been banned or cut in multiple territories. The scene is the reason the film exists and it’s also the reason most people shouldn’t watch it. It’s also the point at which the film stops being about Ben. Up to there he’s the one doing things and the crew are recording, and after it the distinction has gone. That’s the whole progression delivered in a single sequence.
There’s a difference between depicting something and using it. This scene has a function in the argument and the film pays for it by refusing to make it entertaining in any way. The test is whether the sequence could be removed without the work collapsing. If it could, it was content.
A scene of normality immediately afterward does more damage than any reaction shot. The reader supplies the horror of the contrast.
Know when your subject requires something you’re not willing to write. That’s a legitimate limit and recognizing it early is better than producing a compromised version.
How It Was Made
Three students at a Belgian film school made it with borrowed equipment, a tiny budget, and family members in the cast, including Poelvoorde’s actual relatives playing Ben’s parents.
The three of them also play themselves. Remy Belvaux is the director, Andre Bonzel is the cameraman, Poelvoorde is Ben, and all three use their own names. That collapses the distance the film would otherwise have.
That method is why it works. The production is a small crew following a man with a camera, and the amateur look isn’t a style, it’s the actual circumstances of filming.
It won at Cannes in 1992, was released to enormous controversy, and has been difficult to see in some countries ever since. Belvaux died in 2006 and neither of the other two made anything comparable.
Poelvoorde went on to a major career in French language comedy. That’s its own strange footnote. The man who plays Ben has spent thirty years being a popular comic actor, and the performance here’s the reason anybody knew his name.
What It Predicted
The film is thirty years old and it describes an arrangement that’s since become ordinary.
A person doing something for an audience, a crew whose livelihood depends on the person continuing, and a relationship where the watching has become part of the doing. Ben performs for the camera. He escalates because it’s being filmed. The crew know this and continue because without him they have nothing.
That circuit is now the basic economy of a very large amount of media, and the film identified it before the technology existed to make it universal. Nothing in it requires a serial killer. Replace him with anybody who has discovered that attention rewards escalation and the structure holds. It saw the whole influencer economy coming, and that impresses me more than anything else in it. The prediction stays with me longer than the jokes do.
This film was made the same year as the first season of The Real World and two years before the format spread across Europe. Whether that’s prescience or coincidence, it’s describing an arrangement that didn’t yet have a name.
The title refers to the newsroom principle that ordinary events aren’t news and inverted ones are. The film’s position is that once you’ve decided to point a camera at something, you’ve created a reason for it to become worth filming.
A satire that identifies a mechanism will outlast one that mocks a target. Targets date and mechanisms recur. This film has no interest in any particular person and enormous interest in what happens when watching becomes an economic relationship.
Ask whether your subject needs its specifics. If the argument holds with the details swapped out, you’ve found something structural. The strongest satires are indistinguishable in form from the thing they’re satirizing. This one has no frame, no commentary and no safe position. That’s why it still functions.
Should you watch Man Bites Dog?
Yes, once, and know what you’re agreeing to. It’s a film about the people holding the camera instead of the man in front of it, very funny for forty minutes and then deliberately not, with one sequence most people shouldn’t watch and which the film can’t exist without. I’m giving it an 8 because I admire its nerve more than almost any satire I know, and I’d never recommend it to anybody without a warning attached.
