 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Nic Balthazar, 2007, Belgium, 93mins, Dutch with subtitles
Cast: Greg Timmermans, Titus de Voogdt, Maarten Claeyssens, Laura Verlinden
'It takes a death', we are told by a teary-eyed mother. So begins award-winning Flemish bully-porn Ben X, an agonising 93 minutes of watching an autistic boy tormented and humiliated by his school chums. As with Remy Belvaux's fly-on-the-wall serial killer mocumentary Man Bites Dog (1993), this isn't cinema as entertainment, but the kind of thing that could be used at Guantanamo to break down the emotional resolve of particularly hardy prisoners.
Newcomer Greg Timmermans stars as Ben, a high-school student with Asperger's syndrome. Everyday activities such as brushing his teeth and getting a bus are for him a nerve-wracking ordeal. Life is made even harder due to the ritual humiliation he suffers everyday at the hands of his classmates. Ben finds solace and self-worth in the online world of Archlord - a medieval equivalent of the internet sensation Second Life. Here he acts out his hero fantasies and even strikes up an online relationship with fellow gamer and emo-hottie Scarlite. However, as the narrative of the film progresses the boundaries between the real world and the world of the game begin to blur. Ben internalises his bullies as orcs and trolls, while Scarlite decides that she must meet Ben in real life before the game ends for good.
The drama of Ben X suffers somewhat from a sense of inevitability. This kind of schoolyard revenge fantasy is increasingly familiar both in film and in the media. It usually ends in a suicide, or a school shooting or both - not necessarily in that order. The fact that Ben X is based on a novel written by the director Nic Balthazar, itself based on a true story only adds to this conclusion.
Although ostensibly an expose on bullying, Ben X has parallels with the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime (2003), in that it uses the outlook of an Asperger's sufferer to explore the absurdities of the conventions which govern everyday life. Ben is constantly questioning and exploring the metaphors which we live by and much of the film's dialogue revolves around clever wordplay. This is sadly somewhat lost in translation; the film's title sounds like the Flemish for 'I am nothing' as well as invoking the moniker of Ben's internet avatar alter-ego. An accompanying eardrum-bursting soundtrack of everyday street sounds evokes the sheer sensory overload of the world Ben experiences.
Computer generated footage from the cyber world of Archlord is skilfully interwoven throughout. The opening title sequence, as a barbarian on horseback gallops through a snow covered forest, is particularly impressive, while much of Ben and Scarlite's relationship is played out between two pixellated avatars. The film hints that Asperger's is the psychological zeitgeist for a generation immersed in the hyper-reality of technology. Ben is the archetypal everyman of his generation where emotional intelligence is increasingly irrelevant as social experience is filtered through the mechanised mediums of the mobile phone and the internet. Although Ben is autistic, his fellow classmates seem equally devoid of emotion or feeling as they pull his trousers down, film it and post the ensuing humiliating photos on the internet.
Ben uses the world of Archlord to make sense of and understand the world around him. However, Ben X suggests that the increasing exposure to the cyber-reality provided by new media only dehumanises us, rather than help us understand those who are different. |
