Seldom has a first feature from a competely unknown trio attained such cult status as C’est arrivé près de chez vous. After its first screening in Cannes, the film has embarked on a lap of honour of the international festivals, leaving a stunned audience in its wake. After C’est arrivé près de chez vous, the concept of black humour has acquired a new and grimmer meaning.While the film is about a ‘professional’ lust murderer, its shock effect is largely to be found in the very vital and realistic form. The three directors also play in the film; Benoît Poelvoorde plays the important role of the murderer and the other two more or less play themselves as a team of reporters making a documentary about the murderer. Poelvoorde’s acting is breathtaking; with a convincing and natural arrogance he plays straight to the camera, which stick to him like a limpet. The black & white footage increases the documentary effect, which is however never completely convincing because of the weirder-than-weirdness.Konrad Maquestieau write in Andere Sinema: ‘It isn’t really about a film crew making a report about a murderer, but about a murderer who makes a film’. The film goes too far for some professional viewers. In an article in Sight & Sound, B. Ruby Rich spoke out against the ‘snuff-film violence with which it slams its viewers’. But no critic could deny that it is a very powerful film. Maquestieau again: ‘The power of the film is in the short-circuiting of two elements which seldom meet: cruelty and poetry’.
