Rac­er and the Jailbird

In its native Bel­gian, Michaël R Roskam’s lat­est fea­ture was titled Le Fidèle (The Faith­ful), which is fair­ly alright as far as movie names go. In the crazy world of inter­na­tion­al film dis­tri­b­u­tion and title trans­la­tion, this evolved into the rather clunky Rac­er and the Jail­bird. This naff nomen­cla­ture serves as a warn­ing as effec­tive as the sig­nage above Dante’s apoc­ryphal Infer­no: ​“Aban­don hope all ye who enter here.”

It stars Adèle Exar­chopou­los as Bibi, the epony­mous Rac­er, and Matthias Schoe­naerts as Gigi, the Jail­bird. The pair meet and – at break­neck speed – fall in love. At this point the sto­ry diverges into three parts which chart their romance, Gigi’s exploits as a Bel­gian bank rob­ber, and the after­math in which a heist goes spec­tac­u­lar­ly awry. Things descend into morose melo­dra­ma from then on, as Bibi pines for Gigi and becomes embroiled with gang­sters in mis­guid­ed attempts to free her incar­cer­at­ed lover. All the while, Gigi skulks around look­ing glum.

It’s an insipid tale which takes plot inspi­ra­tion from the likes of petrol­head antics of Nico­las Wind­ing Refn’s Dri­ve and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, but lacks any of the ambi­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty which pro­pelled those films to great­ness. The weak script offers lit­tle in the way of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment for its two cen­tral play­ers, and man­ages to include more sex scenes than chances for Bibi to dis­play any facet of her per­son­al­i­ty that doesn’t revolve around her né’er-do-well fiancé́.

A spec­tac­u­lar­ly stu­pid third-act twist under­mines the rest of the plot, and giv­en how lit­tle char­ac­ter devel­op­ment is offered beyond a few laboured dog metaphors that hint at Gigi’s trou­bled upbring­ing, there’s no rea­son to real­ly care about the per­il fac­ing the cou­ple. Painful­ly seri­ous and unin­ten­tion­al­ly sil­ly, this is self-indul­gent film­mak­ing at its worst, and a frus­trat­ing­ly bor­ing attempt at rein­vent­ing the neo-noir wheel.