A tasteless trend in movie marketing to reveal titles one letter at a time transitioned seamlessly into movie-making at some point in the last decade or so. Once in a blue moon, the slow and climatic title reveal works in the marketing for a long-term inactive franchise with a significant following; most of the time, it’s just arrogant, a bold assumption that the title of a movie means something to an audience that has not yet seen it. It never works in movie-making itself, and any film that cashes in on the trend instantly loses a bit of this viewer’s grace. Maldoror, a Belgian film with a title that presumptively references the novel Les Chants de Maldoror, uses such a meaningless trick to reveal a title that means nothing to the average viewer (even a French-speaking one). The film’s own justification for the title is as a nonsense name for a secret surveillance operation of an infamous Belgian pedophile, and this anti-creative decision turns out to be an predictive of the woefully misguided and frankly arrogant film that it precedes.
It won’t take a genius to spot Maldoror’s obvious similarity to David Fincher’s Zodiac. Orbiting the actions of a real-life criminal, both films follow obsessive men of the law in their predatory pursuits of the felons. In this case, the cop is Paul Chartier (Anthony Bajon) and the criminal is a fictional serial child molester and killer by the name of Marcel Dedieu (Sergi López) — though the all of the character’s keynotes are lifted from the real-life crimes of Marc Dutroux. Maldoror‘s problems begin with Bajon’s performance. It’s not bad turn — he’s actually pretty excellent — but the performance doesn’t fit within the narrow box the script functionally needs it to, while also not being quite strong enough to transcend the limitations placed upon it. Bajon doesn’t manage to shake his naturally nerdy aesthetic, which prevents him from ever coming across like a threat to law and order in the same way that, say, Zodiac’s leads do. He also scans as more frustrated than obsessive, though the script endlessly prioritizes the latter.
Howard Hawks is often attributed for defining a good film as having three great scenes and no bad ones. Using the same rubric, Maldoror is a baffling film. Director Fabrice Du Welz creates several powerful scenes alongside a handful of absolute stinkers, and the two exist side by side like an unhappily married couple. The warrant search executed in Dedieu’s home is riveting from the moment Chartier and his partner walk through the door until the (painfully) long scene at last concludes. Every turn and every sound, magnified through a great sound design, carries immense stakes. Using a different set of coinage entirely, almost every minute spent with Gina (Alba Gaïa Bellugi), Chartier’s Italian fiancee, ends up regrettable, as her primary purpose seems to be only to get across how her partner’s absence at home demonstrates his obsession. A better film would have either made more substantive and compelling use of her or excised her entirely from the plot.
For a film about the horrors of a pedophilic crime spree that rocked Belgium in the 1990s, very little of the film’s time is spent around children, and as such the crimes feel a bit afloat. There are a few important children who pop us as side characters, and every minute they are on screen (even when they are far away from Dedieu, which is most of the time) should be a reminder of the stakes, but Du Welz fails to realize the weight of that thread in execution. Had this been handled differently, these children could have functioned to remind the viewer of the gravity of judicial failures, their faces doing much more emotional labor than names and statistics ever could. But even if this lack is understandable from a production standpoint, the victims of Dedieu/Dutroux are nonetheless minimized and their absence leaves a gaping hole.
Most crime films, even the great ones, have more than a sprinkling of convenience to them. Things happen precisely at the right or wrong time to the right or wrong person to undeniably plot-based ends. Maldoror feels more like a full meal of contrivance. In a scene so bad it should be declared a crime against melodrama, Chartier, after fleeing the hospital where his wife is in labor, gets hit by a car in his own destructive haste. Unfortunately for De Welz, the climax delivers another of these scenes. Chartier finally confronts his predatory nemesis: “You’re a cop. You can’t do anything,” Dedieu chastises the presumptive neoliberal audience. Bang. Chartier predictably responds by killing the pedophile, an extrajudicial execution that is simultaneously an affirmation of and revolt against the criminal’s words just moments before. This scene is also revealing of the film’s chosen critique of the system: Du Welz is so hyper-focused on individual actors of the state that his film can’t help but reinforce the “bad egg” theory behind reactionary resistance to systemic change. If we just replace the bad egg(s) with a good one, all will be well, the political refrain would have it. But to call Maldoror a critique of the system is much like labeling a pork loin kosher — it’s quite simply and egregiously false.
