News & Notes — Review – Borgman

The appearance of a stranger who brings about a radical revision in a domestic situation is a narrative starting point of such dramatic potential it virtually constitutes a genre of modern drama. The premise has generated at least 4 cinematic master works- Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1966), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997)- and dozens of lesser films and plays, from Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955) to the 1939 Maxwell Anderson play Key Largo, made into a film by John Huston in 1948.

Borgman, a 2013 film by Dutch filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam is an icy cold, wry, elegantly brutal and unsettling addition to the list of honor. Elements of horror (the central image of the naked Borgman seated atop his sleeping hostess is a seemingly direct reference to Fuseli’s famous Nightmare) and science fiction (victims of the invading clan seem altered in a way that is reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) alternate with elements of petty domestic drama involving hired help and family disputes, and the result a mélange that leaves viewers equally fascinated and frustrated. An allegory of sorts, Borgman seems, like Teorama, to have as its primary object a kind of social commentary (“Borgman,” in Dutch, means “the man who takes tolls,” and is the name given landlords in the Middle Ages), but its an allegory of the sort that never permits a one-to-one correspondence between the nightmarish scenario it sets forth and its corollary in the real world. It’s disregard for credibility is of the sort that drives literalists to distraction, and its failure to stick to any generic program tests the tolerance of the rest.

Searching for points of reference by which to get a handle on its strangeness, many reviewers have labeled Borgman surreal. But while the film has something in common with surrealism’s preoccupation with the irrational, and although some of the key images resonate with that uncanny power of something both terribly familiar and terribly strange, its primary interest is not in psychology. If Borgman can be identified with any historical form of artistic enterprise, it is probably absurdism, which is to say that van Warmerdam has far more in common with Samuel Beckett than Luis Bunuel. In that regard, probably the closest analogue for the dramatic and philosophical thrust of Borgman is the “comedy of menace” of playwright Harold Pinter and Pinter’s menacing- stranger urtext The Birthday Party.  Recognizing the dark, subtle, and subversive humor at work in the film is key to avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to its violence and its refusal to yield up readily-apparent meaning. The undercurrents are more troubling than the darkest horror film, but the humor suggests a philosophical attitude toward humans that avoids both sentimentalism on the one hand and sensationalism on the other.

At least as far as its fundamentally absurdist orientation and humor goes, Borgman’s closest relative among the cinematic forebears is Polanski’s wonderful (and woefully underappreciated) Cul-de-Sac. But where a painfully real humanity underscores Cul-de-Sac, the humans in Borgman are uniformly unsympathetic, where they can be recognized as human at all. In this, Borgman is also about as far from Renoir’s deep-hearted and winningly humanistic Boudu Saved From Drowning as a film to which another is superficially compared can be.Tonally, Borgman is closer to the crisp, almost scientific frigidity of Funny Games, but unlike Funny Games, not narrowly defined by a socio-politico agenda. There are clearly elements of satire and a biting critique of bourgeois values in general and Dutch middle class lifestyles in particular at play in Borgman, but that critique does not contain or make wholly explicable the much more complex experience of the film.

To be properly appreciated, Borgman’s fundamental ambiguity and implacable originality needs to be seen as a its most valuable attribute. Thus, while its titular character, emerging from a hole in the ground located in deep forest, calls up and plays upon the resonances of classical mythology (Pan and the figurations of paganism), fairy tales, and Christian mythology (the devil), the film’s refusal to fall back upon supernatural explanations for the presence of destructive forces in the world is a powerful gesture of resistance, and never so much as in a time where appeals to mysticism and supernatural authority have wrought such devastating consequences for humanity. Perhaps the key to what Borgman stands for, as a fictional creation, is his plea to the person to whom he first petitions for help (and who subsequently petitions him) is that the only thing he wants to do is play. The figure of Borgman, in that regard, seems to align more with a function than an actual being, and indeed, what transpires from his summons to existence, as well as the effect the film given his name has on viewers, could be viewed as nothing so much as the ravages of the liberated imagination.  Among the other ways we might identify the figure, we should consider the idea of Borgman as the embodiment of the creative spirit- the Dionysian spirit, in Nietzsche’s formulation- which “only wants to play,” and whose trace is all the things that happen when the invitation to a completely liberated artistic imagination is taken up. Borgman, in this light, might well be seen as the incarnation of van Warmerman himself, a reading that does not seem so much a stretch in the light of van Warmerdam’s quintessentially postmodernist 2006 film Waiter, where the overburdened waiter of the title steps out of his on screen life and interacts with the (also fictional) screen writer who has created him, and played by none other than director van Warmerdam himself.

Borgman, as the film begins, lies at rest in the earth like a dormant seed, violently roused by forces hostile to it, whose impassioned desire to eliminate him is his call to action. Like Marina, we, the audience, think we can make some claim on what comes into existence when we yield to creative imagination’s appeal. But also like Marina, we’re mistaken in our assumption that its goal- the goal of artistic production- is to save us from death and to satisfy our fantasies. Borgman’s lack of transparency, its resistance to interpretation, its fundamental antipathy to the whole idea of fixed meaning, aligns it with a large body of contemporary art, and the deep-rooted cynicism that tempers art in the postmodern era. On the surface, it bears a passing similarity to a number of films and the work of a number of filmmakers that have preceded it. In truth, it is a one-off, and a singular cinematic experience.

-Barry Snyder, BFS Co-Founder