Crazy Love

As the song within the film goes "Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars…"

Also released under the title Love is a Dog from Hell – an allusion to a book of poems by Charles Bukowski, whose short story The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, CA and semi-autobiographical novel Ham on Rye provided the film-makers with material and ideas for the film – Crazy Love disappeared almost without a trace on its initial release in the late 1980s, despite winning good notices, assorted awards and the support of Hollywood heavyweights like Francis Ford Coppola and Sean Penn.

Put it down to a combination of bad timing, Barbet Schroeder's official, star-name entry Barfly emerging around the same time, and an comparatively uncompromising approach to its subject matter, a tragic loser whose search for somebody to love ultimately leads to a necrophiliac scenario – more on which later.

Whatever happened, Crazy Love is here now on extra-laden DVD in a luminous new tranfer from Mondo Macabro and fully merits the acclaim, with it being hard for me to find fault with any aspect of the production, be it writing, direction, performance or technical and the overall sense emerging that this is a bone fide minor key masterpiece that has inexplicably been overlooked.

Divided into three segments, each taking place taking place in a single, pivotal night, the film opens in 1955 as young Harry Voss (Geert Hunaerts) sits enraptured watching a Cocteau-like fairy tale unfold on the silver screen and be resolved in time-honoured fashion, the handsome prince and beautiful princess marrying and living happily ever after, the end.

But although Harry steals a still of the princess from the cinema, his story is not that of an Antoine Donael, of someone rescued by images and the imaginary. Rather, they are to prove a glamorous – i.e. magical, illusory – snare.

Back home Harry asks in all innocence whether his father rescued his mother from a castle like in the film. Not knowing quite what to make of this, Mrs Voss replies in the affirmative.

Later Harry is out with his older, more mature friend, Stan (Michael Pas), who shows Harry a magic picture in which a woman loses her clothes but is unimpressed by Harry's stolen view, in which the princess remains fully, defiantly dressed. As they talk, Stan begins to puncture Harry's illusions, to disenchant his world, explaining that – this being conservative small town Belgium after all – the real reason adults marry is so that they can fuck…

The pair go to the fairground where Harry can make out with a girl. He gets onto one of the rides with a slightly older girl with bad teeth, but does not know how to respond to her hesitant advances in the – not quite – tunnel of love.

Despairing, Stan takes Harry to another sideshow as he continues his lecture, the sight of the two women wrestlers in the ring – one a savage, the other with a transparent top but masked – proving less of an attraction than one of the other spectators, a fiery-tempered, hard-drinking Italian woman whom they then follow to the car park and observe with her man – and not her husband, it would seem.

The show is interrupted by the untimely arrival of the woman's son, whom Harry recognises from his class in school. Thus knowing where she lives, a plan hatches…

That night, Harry hears noises coming from his parents room and observes them making love. Worse, his mother catches him catching them in the act. The next morning the pair have an awkward exchange over the breakfast table: "Ma, dad didn't kidnap you did he?"

Why, then, did she lie to him? To protect him, the inevitable answer; an answer that only leads to more unanswered questions…

The next day Harry and Stan sneak into the woman's house and find her asleep. Stan tells his younger friend that this is his big chance. Harry makes an attempt to mount the woman, causing her to awaken and understandably freak out. In the confusion Harry and Stan flee. Harry may have failed once more, but Stan has a consolation prize: masturbation…

The second segment occurs in 1962. As the song "Love hurts" plays on the radio to reinforce the dominant theme, the camera slowly tracks around the detail of the room before coming to rest on Harry, his face horribly disfigured by acne. He goes out and gets on the bus to go to the doctor – a child staring at him all the way – whereby we learn that tonight is the high school dance.

The graduation ceremony goes ahead without Harry – the first time he has been absent in the film – as Lisa Vilani (Anne Van Essche), the homecoming queen type if this were America, and her lustful would-be-suitor, your standard-issue jock or preppy type, are introduced.

Harry had planned to spend the evening at home, listening to yet more mournful songs of unrequited love on the radio, but his classmate Jeff (Gene Bervoets) has other ideas and drags him along to the dance. Along the way they break into a railway truck containing crates of whisky and have a fortifying drink, while Harry reads a poem that he has written for Lisa; perhaps one of the few moments that doesn't quite work, highlighting as it does the divergent third-act trajectories of the real-life Bukowski – though frequently as expressed through his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, necessarily problematising matters somewhat – and the fictional Harry Voss.

At the dance Harry summons up the courage to approach Lisa, but does so at the exact moment his rival does. Needless to say Harry is the disappointed one. Outside, however, Jeff has a surprise: The sexually voracious Marina, whom Harry can have seconds once he himself has finished. However, although Marina tries, she cannot get past Harry's acne. Her look transforms from lust to obvious discomfort as Harry gets more intimate; a moment that seems to encapsulate the attraction/repulsion towards women that lies at the heart of much of Bukowki's writing while also suggesting its source.

The would-be poet then goes to the washroom, wraps his face in toilet roll and emerges into the hall like a mummy or the invisible man. Emboldened now that his pustulent physiognomy is hidden, he advances on Lisa who – sympathy perhaps – consents to dance with him to the incredulous stares of those more blessed (or, if one wants to put a Bukowskian misanthropic spin on things, less cursed).

This small victory achieved, the now-drunken Harry has his friend drive him home, but is unable to cover the distance between the road and the front door. Two policemen arrive, inquire if the poem they found in the railway car is his, and cart a nonchalant, less than cognisant Harry off in their van…

The third story revisits Harry in 1976, seemingly down and out and devoid of poetic aspirations. The scene is a bar, showing the influence of the 1960s in terms of the inhabitants styles if not the music that is playing.

Largely oblivious to his surroundings, Harry notices an old acquaintance, Bill (Amid Chakir) who has just got out of prison. A scuffle breaks out, Harry taking the opportunity to steal a bottle from behind the bar as the barman deals with his friend. Outside the two men walk through the foggy streets. As Harry drains the last dregs from the bottle outside a hospital an ambulance draws in. The ambulance men go inside, leaving their cargo unattended.

"Dare we – for old times sake?"
"You never dared"

And so the two misfits steal a body, taking it back to a shack. There Harry opens the body bag, finding inside a beautiful young woman, "still warm". He slicks back his hair, a conditioned reflex, and, heedless of the law of the father/morality/the superego, as expressed by Bill – "I wouldn't do that" – makes love to her, the only one he has encountered who has not spurned him. This, it emerges, is true love, but what can the traditional 'til death do us part' mean in such crazy circumstances? The answer is a transcendental commitment, perversely equalling the likes of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer for its spiritual purity and transcendentalism and Luis Buñuel for its surrealist commitment to the impossibility of coventional, societally approved love. (One also wonders if the humping frogs the young Harry watches intently are a reference to the Jean Epstein's Fall of the House of Usher (1926).)

Necrophilia, like paedophilia, is, after all, one of those subjects that presents a real challenge to the film-maker or other artist. The obvious approaches are to use it as the subject of laughter ("to know life you have to fuck death in the gall bladder" or however the line in Flesh for Frankenstein goes) thereby disarming it, or to simply use it for crude shock effect, in the manner of Joe D'Amato's Buio Omega/Beyond the Darkness. (Not that I am knocking Uncle Joe; there is something to be said for the disarming way in which he would throw together sex and violence in that "you want it, you got it!" manner.) The real challenge comes when the artist takes it seriously, approaching the subject without derision, condescension or easy answers.

And this is where Crazy Love is most successful and most challenging, surpassing both the notorious Nekromantic and the minor arthouse success Kissed (though $deity knows I love those films too…). The film-makers do not sensationalise their subject matter, rather treating it as the near-inevitable outgrowth of Harry's human all too human condition. All he wants is the chance to give and receive love and understanding; an opportunity fatally denied him in his formative years…

To be a poet requires a sensitive soul; to prosper in the banal world requires the selling of one's soul. This is the conundrum that faces Harry, Bukowksi and the makers of Crazy Love. All decided to stick with their dreams, regardless of what society and convention might say. Can the viewer or critic make the same claim?

So, besides this absolute commitment, why is Crazy Love a (minor?) masterpiece awaiting rediscovery?

Well, returning to earlier, we identified the performances, direction, writing and technical aspects as being near flawless.

The performances: The young Geert Hunaerts could easily have been Jean-Pierre Leaud had circumstances been different. He is that good. So is his adult incarnation, Josse de Pauw, charged with the difficult task of incarnating both the 18-year-old and 33-year-old versions of Harry – in addition, as sharp-eyed viewers may note, his father in the first segment. (One wonders if the 33 is a Christic reference, given the (negative?) transcendental resolution to the film, which one is nevertheless loath to spoil by mentioning explicitly.) Not that this is to discount the more minor characters, each of whom is pitch-perfect.

Of course, the best actor in the world can accomplish little if the direction is lacking. Dominique Deruddere's is not, always seeming to find the right place for the camera, the right time to move it or make a cut.

Watching the film one would hardly realise that it began as a short, with the third story having been reconfigured from its original format. (And here Bukowski apparently felt that the filmmakers had improved on his original.) Instead the connections in Harry's saga – the idee fixe of the perfect woman (cf. Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) as incarnated by Florence Béiard as both princess and corpse in an amour fou of the highest order; the full moon that opens and closes the film, replete with connotations of circularity, wholeness/completion and madness; and, above all, the extraordinarily skilled deployment of music – appear as if there from the first.

Following from – or preceding – this the writing captures the pure essence of Bukowski. Though the first segment is not directly derived from him – except, perhaps, through the secondary influence of John Fante – and the action displaced from 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles to 1950s, 60s and 70s Belgium (poverty and war in the former, prosperity and peace in the latter) there is little if anything that feels out of place or time. The self-proclaimed loser or failure, the 'ideal reader' for Bukowksi and this film, is perhaps universal…

Technically the main thing that shines through is the quality of the lighting and cinematography, giving things a subtly skewed, exaggerated or off-key aspect – the hyper-reality of Voss's "worst case" acne, for instance, or the unnatural yellow light that dominates in the third segment – to unveil a surreal beauty in even the most grotesque and degraded situations – "beauty will be convulsive or not at all" indeed.

All in all, this is that rare film that justifies hype like "the most astonishing film debut since David Lynch's Eraserhead"

Mondo Macabro's Region 0 NTSC DVD presents Crazy Love in a gorgeous high definition anamorphic transfer, presented in its 1.66:1 OAR and with clear and surprisingly full-bodied stereo sound – particularly important when much of the meaning comes through the music.

In terms of extras we get a Belgian TV documentary on Deruddere and company, which is packed with useful detail, if slightly 'local boy makes good' at times, and a video interview with the genial director, laughing as he recounts the scam worked on the funders – they got approval for a less contentious Bukowksi piece, A Zen Wedding, then shot the Copulating Mermaid short with the money – and recalls his nervous first encounter with the legendary Bukowksi.

Well worth watching, then, and only enhancing one's appreciation for the film and whetting the appetite for more.

Along with a characteristically well-written text pieces on Belgian/Flemish fantastique cinema more generally, there's really nothing more you could ask for shy of a two-disc package containing Deruddere's shorts and a CD of the film's delightful soundtrack, reminiscent of the best thing Bettie Serveert never did.