Film - Think

Curator recently posted a short piece on JCVD and related issues. Excerpts:

In the beginning of JCVD, Jean-Claude action heroes his way through a five minute single take of guns firing, fists flying, and bombs bursting. Jean-Claude sweeps in sweaty arcs through debris, pirouetting through walls and flames, and battling villains across several planes of action like an artist. It is beautiful. The camera floats in and around this film within a film in such a way that for a brief moment grants transcendence to Jean-Claude’s typically straight-to-video exertions. But this unexpected glimpse of Van Damme in all his glory quickly gives way to a court scene custody battle in which his daughter frankly tells the judge she would rather be with her mother because all the kids at school laugh at her when her dad is on TV in crappy movies...

What we hear in this monologue is not as important as its delivery, and its context – a film in which Van Damme has skillfully acted through a stack of parallel storylines. His hypnotizing dance through the opening five minute long tracking shot of his latest action film says something about Van Damme. He has been unjustly ignored and marginalized. His iconic status lends his now mostly straight to video performances both a note of shame or tragedy, and a corresponding smirk of schadenfreude from a mercurial audience. But this iconic status is also what makes JCVD much more than an exercise in snappy filmmaking. It drills down into what it means to feel as lost as the real life Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the way we shoulder the burden of our mistakes that can’t simply be written out of the script.