THE FALLING STAR (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon 2024)

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DOMINIQUE ABEL, FIONA GORDON IN THE FALLING STAR

DOMINIQUE ABEL, FIONA GORDON: THE FALLING STAR (2024)

A Belgian Kaurismäki manqué

It's hard to see quite what motivates anyone to make a film like Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon's The Falling Star. Habit and past successes, I suppose: there have been about half a dozen films before by or involving this couple, the Belgian Abel and Australian Gordon, that have gathered a cult following. Something has gone right, fans have been generated, and a team has been assembled. This may just be a glitch, or perhaps a decline in powers. It's not weariness: there's too much energy rather than too little, but not enough emotion: the issues and the plot are more pretexts for comic subplots and bits of physical business and sight gags than ways of engendering sympathy.

But if the couple "are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on-screen," as Peter Debruge says in his Variety review, this comes included with well-executed technical aspects, a look most attentive to color, a fine cinematic polish. It's a good looking film, in an old-fashioned way, with old fashioned things like a satisfyingly clacking manual portable typewriter (its owner has no computer) and rotary telephones, not to mention back-projection used during car-driving scenes. There's no effort to rule out a present-day setting; its trappings are just kept comfortably out of sight most of the time.

The story revolves around a dark Brussels beer bar tended by Boris (Dominique Abel), in hiding from a crime committed as an activist 35 years prior. In bursts a bearded stranger (team regular Bruno Romy) in the opening scene. He recognizes Bruno, and whips out a pistol to shoot him - which wildly misfires, because that crime involved a bomb that robbed this man of his arm, and the one he's using is robotic. It flies around and falls off. This about sets the tone: quirky, weird, buffoonish, a choreography of masterfully executed, utterly silly physical business. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are role models.

Soon Bruno's friends have found an exact double (also played by Abel), the gloomy, lonely horticulturalist Dom, a regular user of antidepressant patches (they'll come in later) whom they semi-kidnap and place in the bar to tend it posing as Bruno, to protect him. They don't bother to tell Dom that the bearded one-arm man, who quickly collected his detached bionic limb, is likely to return at any moment and try another shot. Dom has been separated from his wife Fiona (Gordon) ever since the tragic death of their only child. She, dressed in boots, big glasses, long hair, and a bulky raincoat, is a detective, investigating a missing person, and the film follows her throughout.

These are eccentric and forlorn folk, especially the three played by the lead couple, and the comparison with Aki Kaurismäki is inevitable. It's also inevitable to think of Kaurismäkis recent Fallen Leaves, which also revolves around a dive bar where music is heard, also inevitable to note that that other film draws us into sympathy for its sad lovers that just doesn't get aroused here. Instead there's Boris' hyper active girlfriend Kayuko (Kaori Ito), a frenetic dancer and manipulator of Bruno's stand-in, part of the bar scene, as is the big bar doorman Tim (Philippe Martz).

The theme is of a wanted man who seeks to escape using a double. Abel, plays both. The writer-partner-director-double star is tall and wire thin, a former clown with a John Waters pencil mustache skilled at physical comedy, falling, being double jointed, twisting, dancing. He is no Jacques Tati and there is no Monsieur Hulot here though. And Fiona isn't in a couple relationship with either of her husband's roles - quite, till the end anyway.

"Next time someone wistfully insists, they don’t make ’em like they used to,” Peter Debruge writes, "why not point that nostalgic cinephile to the work of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon? The Belgium-based creative couple are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on-screen." But Debruge's review's title signals that the dual auteurs "stumble" with their "odd blend of slapstick and film noir this time." "As film plots go," Debruge sums up, "this one’s as dumb as they come." In fact any summary of that plot is likely to mislead the reader into thinking it makes coherent sense, while actually it is only a rough framework on which to hang a series of comic scenes heavy with mime and stage business: dialogue is sparse and doesn't mean much and the rewards of character development will be sought in vain.

There is however a quite wonderful well-oiled, laidback group dance in the bar toward the end. As Neil Young explains in his Screen Daily review: "an impromptu dance-routine to the raucous rockabilly strains of Link Wray’s 'Raw-Hide' fulfils its show-stopping function with genial aplomb." Fiona, her name in the movie as in life, the eccentric private detective on the periphery of most of the action, has come into the bar, and winds up dancing and playfully intertwining with Dom, who has been taught to go by "Bruno," and other denizens of the joint: pure fun, and wonderfully executed. And without any ultimate point - but that's how this movie functions. A moment of wistfulness, and more good visual business, comes when Dom and Fiona share toilet paper in adjoining stalls, a scene that has become perhaps the film's signature image.

The Falling Star/L'Étoile filante , 98 mins., debuted Aug. 2, 2023 at Locarno; also shown at Telluride and Thessaloniki. Now released by Kino Lorber at Quad Cinema, NYC Aug. 30, 2024 and Laemmle Royal in LA Sept., 13 , the film is also to be available on blu-ray.