What becomes of the broken hearted?

Now there’s a lyric that encapsulates THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN (MA) an extraordinary, engaging, emotionally and intellectually affecting film that charts a love story from burgeoning beauty through to bitterness and bereavement, yet never loses its buoyancy.

Didier, a free wheeling muso, and Elise, a tattoo artist whose skin is an illustration of her life, meet, fall for each other, fall pregnant, become proud parents of Maybelle.

They play in a Bluegrass band and Bluegrass is integrated in a variety of ways into the story and forms the intrinsic link between all the main issues that appear in the film: life, death, birth, America, motherhood and fatherhood, finding consolation, life after death.

The last two issues come into play when Maybelle is struck down by serious illness. A circle broken begets a circumference of suffering, a turning to supernatural beliefs in a desperation where logic is waylaid.

The schism between the secular and the spiritual is spotlit in the father’s on stage rant against stem cell science being sublimated and sabotaged by superstition, miracles of medicine traduced by outmoded mumbo jumbo morality. Suffer the little children indeed.

Johan Heldenbergh as Didier and Veerle Baetens as Elise are stupendously good in their roles, honed with a humanity that hallows honesty.

The whole production, helmed by Felix van Groeningen, has honesty and humanity on high. It is a truth universally acknowledged that even when faced with what is most ugly, our situation has within it the sparks of life. In THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN, the sparks of life crackle and sparkle and fizz, a constant constellation of energy and more than than worthy of our attention.

Like all of us, Didier and Elise are looking for light in a very dark world.
And it’s the music, not medicine or myth, that heals, melody over malady, the rhythm of life triumphant.