Going the Distance

This week's DVDs see Amos Gitai move away from home and "Eldorado," a road trip driven by quirk.

A left-of-center amble through the oddness that is contemporary Belgium, Bouli Lanners’ “Eldorado” is a splooge of self-conscious poker-faced quirk, with a little too much laconic dead air and steel guitar twangs à la the Wenders/Kaurismäki/Jarmusch school of indie grunge. But road movies are resonant and beguiling for a reason — the readymade metaphors are there for the taking, the relationship we all have to automobile and asphalt remains one of modern life’s most powerful yet underacknowledged social forces, and you can tell something about a nation from its road culture that’s unavailable elsewhere. Lanners, who also stars and wrote the script, has a terrifically droll widescreen take on his home turf — it’s one of those movies in which a stranger, flagged down from the roadside, emerges from his camper stark naked except for sneakers and hat, and introduces himself as Alain Delon.

We’ve seen this kind of shrugging indie farce before, but so? It’s still funny, and still saturated in a magical realist kind of way with love for what we take in stride everyday. Lanners is Yvan, a fat, unkempt classic car dealer (which means he buys and resells old Chevys, one at a time) who finds his house burglarized, and the burglar still hiding under the bed. The faceoff, of course, lasts so long Yvan falls asleep in a chair and the culprit runs. But he’s caught, a desperate and harmless ex-junkie (Fabrice Adde), whom the slovenly and obviously lonesome Yvan feeds and, after a very hesitant courtship of sorts, agrees to drive back into the city. (The title refers to the station wagon, not an idealized destination.)

The journey is lackadaisical, stone-faced, and increasingly chaotic, as it becomes clear (though unsaid, thank God) that the two men fill holes in each other’s lives. But it’s the landscape that sings: Lanners has found virtually every strange composition the Belgium outlands have to offer, and the 35mm vistas are grand enough to distract you from slyly approaching tragedy, and from Lanners himself, seedy and dim and flabby, with a hilariously sympathetic-yet-astonished deadpan glare.

“One Day You’ll Understand” (Kino) and “Eldorado” (Film Movement) are now available on DVD.

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