MOVIE REVIEW : Boivin’s ‘Barjo’: Weird Without Being Involving

Venturesome French writer-director Jerome Boivin and the late science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick would seem a sure-fire combination. Boivin made a distinctive debut with the provocative and disturbing 1990 “Baxter,” about a dog with a human capacity for thought but not for love or fear; Dick provided the original stories for “Blade Runner” and “Total Recall.” However, “Barjo” (at the Sunset 5), Boivin’s film of Dick’s “Confessions of a Crap Artist” is highly problematical--a film that a few people are likely to love madly and the rest of us will find a bore.

“Barjo” (“Nut Case”) is weird without being involving. A young wife and mother, Fanfan (Anne Brochet), married to Charles (Richard Bohringer), the prosperous, middle-aged owner of an aluminum manufacturing company, seems merely headstrong and impulsive until her exceedingly strange twin brother, Barjo (Hippolyte Girardot), a skinny, nerdy guy with thick glasses, comes to live in her attic.

Barjo, who predicted the death of the sun and the end of the world when he was 12, seems part idiot savant and part Peter Sellers in “Being There.” He’s loaded with facts but little comprehension and compulsively types up everything that he thinks about or experiences in the course of the day as a kind of preparation for the apocalypse he prophesies.

Very soon after Barjo moves into the couple’s handsome contemporary country estate Fanfan develops an instant, obsessive attraction to a young couple who live nearby. In short, Charles abruptly has to contend with a pair of crazies, not to mention all manner of hard-to-explain phenomena.

It would seem that there is no line between Fanfan and Barjo’s inner and outer selves, which means that they’re monsters, especially Fanfan, who’s totally unpredictable and reckless, utterly dangerous. Eventually Charles is sucked up into Fanfan and Barjo’s madness to the extent that in the grip of a jealous rage he shoots a horse, eventually leaving his front yard strewn with dead animals.

There’s no difficulty in recognizing in ourselves the passions and compulsions that drive these people or our terrible capacity for selfishness and cruelty but such insights are not likely to have the cosmic impact of revelation for many people, though this is what Boivin seems to intend. His actors are admirable in their highly focused intensity, but they cannot prevent the characters they portray from seeming anything but tedious and repellent in the extreme. The effectiveness of “Baxter” makes “Barjo” seem all the more disappointing.

*

‘Barjo’ (‘Nut Job’)

Anne Brochet: Fanfan

Richard Bohringer: Charles

Hippolyte Girardot: Barjo

A Myriad Pictures presentation of a PCC Productions-Aliceleo-FR3 Films production. Director Jerome Boivin. Producer Patrick Godeau. Screenplay by Boivin, Jacques Audiard. Cinematographer Jean-Claude Pierrard. Editor Anne Lafarge. Costumes Caroline de Vivaise. Music Hughes Le Bars. Production designer Dominique Maleret. Sound mixer Jean-Pierre Laforce. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Times-rated Mature ( s ex, language, violence, complex adult themes). Realistic depiction of the fatal shooting of a horse, many seemingly dead animals.