Dikkenek

A Belgian comedy. The film tells no single story. There are several characters loosely tied together and the narrative wanders among them. At the centre is Jean-Claude. By his own word a dikkenek, that is, someone who talks constantly and talks big. He is trying to sort out the life of his friend Stef, who is shy, works in an abattoir and cannot talk to anyone. Other people are around them: a family, a school, an estate agent and a policeman who harasses people in traffic. Each has a short section. The humour is in the language. The characters use the particular forms of Belgian French and the lines are exaggerated; some sections rest entirely on wordplay. The register is uneven and some parts are crude; the film makes no attempt to hide it. Jean-Luc Couchard, François Damiens, Mélanie Laurent, Marion Cotillard and Dominique Pinon are in the cast. Olivier Van Hoofstadt directed. It got poor notices on release and did not do well at the box office. In the years after it became a cult in Belgium and France; its lines passed into everyday speech and it was shown again and again on television. An interesting choice for anyone who likes absurd comedy and character sketches. For a viewer watching with subtitles, most of the humour is tied to local speech and is lost in translation.