Vintage Vault: Man Bites Dog
By Jeff Vandusen
Lance Writer
September 12, 2007
 Man Bites Dog feels like a sadistic variation of Stockholm Syndrome. For the first half of the movie, the main character, a charming, wiry and witty serial killer named Benoit is like your best friend. He’s a damn lovable scamp who just happens to get off on murdering people. It seems like a reasonable personality quirk and something you could tolerate, like if your friend was a Rod Stewart fan or something.
Benoit takes you drinking, introduces you to his family and feeds you cake on his birthday. He also explains the finer points of his craft, like the ballast ratio of dumping bodies (“Kids are lighter, so it’s four times the body weight.”) I laughed, oh, how I laughed, because it was so bloody impossible to take what I was seeing seriously; but what we’re all seeing isn’t real, just like the band in Spinal Tap or whatever the hell was so scary in The Blair Witch Project.
That’s what makes Man Bites Dog so brilliant, it fools you, even though you want to believe that what you’re seeing is real. You and the camera crew follow the sophisticated Benoit around and find it hard to look away as he commits these murders with a shit-eating grin spread from ear to ear. It’s all for a laugh and you giggle along with him, particularly at one point where he scares an old lady with a heart condition to the point where she drops dead on the spot. This is all after she invites him and the camera crew in to answer a few of their questions about “loneliness in high-rise apartments.”
The movie takes a turn for a moral worse at about the half-way mark when Benoit and the crew drunkenly bust into a couple’s apartment (at Christmas time where a couple is having sex on their kitchen table) and end up gang raping the woman (who also happens to be pregnant.) In the morning the couple are disemboweled and left to rot. Benoit and the crew, all hung over, leave the flat for breakfast. It’s at this point where you question why the hell you’re watching Man Bites Dog. The brutal nihilism that was once morbidly charming isn’t really funny anymore.
The movie is a guilt trip, but that’s the joke the director is playing on you. We’re all sick, sadistic bastards in the general terms (I wouldn’t say that everybody is, but if you laugh once during the movie, you’d have to be pretty sick).
Rémy Belvaux, the film’s scruffy-looking Belgian-born director, died on September 4, 2006, one year ago to the day I watched Man Bites Dog for the first time…he committed suicide, other details like why or how he killed himself are unknown.
Man Bites Dog was Belvaux’s only film; beforehand he had directed one short called No C4 for Daniel-Daniel. After making the film, Belvaux ran to directing commercials and won a bunch of awards. Man Bites Dog was shown at Cannes in 1992 where it won a critic’s prize.
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