LES VACANCES DE NOËL

With this tenth part Jan Bucquoy calls his ‘Decalogue on the sexual life of Belgians’ a day – even though parts eight and nine are apparently still in various stages of pre-production. Bucquoy made his way through some trying times: from his stylised cinema debut ‘La Vie sexuelle des Belges’ (1993), as penetrating as it was outrageous, to ‘Les vacances de Noël’, conceived as a diary, fully handmade on video, with direct sound and a couple of friends as his actors. The result is a home movie about a humiliating trip to the film festival in Cannes. Bucquoy plays himself, with Noël Godin, the film critic and infamous cake-thrower, by his side, and during the first two parts they are joined by Belgian author Pierre Mertens. The film is announced as a tragicomedy about “deux vieux qui essayent de draguer des jeunes”, and at first sight this is precisely what we are getting: a twosome of soixantehuitards, trying to conquer the hearts of all kinds of girls on the Cannes patios and beaches with their camera at the ready. But underneath the thick layers of nonsense, kitsch and sex there is also a flourishing amount of cultural and social criticism and, most of all, self-irony. The subtitles are an important medium for wayward commentary, hesitating between satirical rubbish and poetical musings. Bucquoy turns himself into a caricature, fabricating a magnification of his own split personality: the older man, who tries to stay young, the womanizer who wants to preach the revolution, the provocateur with a weakness for absolute love, the filmmaker who would like to be a poet.

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project