By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * )
The Belgians are scarcely noted for their sense of humour, but this extraordinarily good-natured comedy, one of the contenders for Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, should revise that stereotype.
A lighthearted variant on Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, in which
a creepy Robert De Niro stalked his television idol, it recalls the mordant humour of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki as it follows the determined campaign of a factory worker to ensure his dumpy daughter achieves fame singing the tuneless songs he pens.
But there's no trace of the Finn's dourness. Director Deruddere maintains an optimism that, given the storyline, would be grotesque if it were not so unabashed. But, like the best comedy, it has a sharp satirical intent. As the title, which recalls Andy Warhol's crack about 15 minutes of fame, suggests, the film seeks to focus on our media-driven obsession with celebrity, but it never lets the fun get in the way.
Jean Vereecken (de Pauw), a laid-off factory worker who is the biggest, blindest fan of his plain and talentless daughter Marva (Van Der Gucht), enters her in talent quests and is undeterred by her serial and dismal failure. He hits on the idea of kidnapping a real pop star and holding her to ransom, demanding instant hit status for one of his songs by his daughter.
There's a lot here that recalls recent British comedies such as Brassed Off or The Full Monty - Deruddere's Belgium seems like a Flemish north of England, with its grinding poverty and urban hopelessness. But the film loves everybody - its heroes and villains, between whom it draws no distinction - so much it drags us along.
It invites us to conclude that the well-meaning will succeed whatever their means - which may be suspect not just morally but because it isn't true.
But that doesn't matter, because the film has so much fun concocting the fiction that it's impossible not to emerge humming the dire theme song all the way home.
Cast: Josse de Pauw, Eva van der Gucht, Thekla Reuten
Director: Dominique Deruddere
Rating: M
Running time: 99 mins
Screening: Lido
