Being Jean-Claude
Van Damme

Mabrouk El Mechri on JCVD, his self-reflexive
meditation on the Muscles from Brussels

ACTION ANGST: Jean-Claude Van Damme

by MARK SLUTSKY

Pop culture has pretty much completely lost its ability to surprise. Celebrities play themselves in movies and on TV, and send up their images in ways unimaginable even 20 years ago. A new washed-up star bares his or her life for a reality show pretty much every week. Flavor Flav hooked up with Brigitte Nielsen on the set of The Surreal Life. Screech made a sex tape.

And yet, despite all the endless self-reflexivity of the post-Charlie Kaufman, post-reality show popcult landscape, it still comes as somewhat of a shock that one of the year’s most accomplished and moving performances comes from… Jean-Claude Van Damme? Yes, that Jean-Claude Van Damme: the international karate champ. The star of Bloodsport, Universal Soldier, Hard Target and Timecop. The Muscles from Brussels.

Written and directed by France’s Mabrouk El Mechri, Van Damme’s new film, JCVD, isn’t the kind of chuckleheaded action picture the world is used to seeing from the athletic Belgian. Well, not exactly. While JCVD does open with what amounts to a melancholy action tour-de-force—a long, uninterrupted tracking shot featuring Van Damme disposing of a platoon’s worth of baddies, set to Baby Huey’s cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Hard Times”—this set piece turns out to be a movie-within-a-movie.

As he steps off the set, we realize that Van Damme is playing himself—a tortured and lonely washed-up star, stuck in a custody battle and owing back taxes, who still holds onto a likeable earnestness. But when he wanders into a post office/bank (it’s a European thing) in Belgium during a hold-up, the world outside simply assumes he’s snapped and assumed the bad guy role from one of his films.

Telling the story from multiple perspectives and jumping around in time, El Mechri’s film is a meditation on celebrity culture and storytelling, as well as a funny and at times thrilling take on what it’s really like to be Jean-Claude Van Damme. In another bravura sequence, the actor delivers an uninterrupted monologue to the camera about his life, breaking into real tears.

Earning trust

Speaking to the Mirror at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the director talked about earning the trust of the shy and sensitive star. “We had dinner in Paris and it went pretty well, because he saw that I was pretty honest with him. I didn’t try to please him, or say ‘you’re amazing.’ I told him what I thought were his flaws. I told him about the bad films I think he did—and the good ones too. We talked about The Quest, the first film that he directed. There are some really good shots in it, and I remembered those shots and I asked him about how he did them, and he was like, ‘Wow, you know my work.’ We ended up having drinks at three in the morning, talking about love, friendship and a bunch of things, and the next morning he had a screening of my first film. He was pretty moved by the film, and he told me, ‘You can do whatever you want with me.’ So basically, that’s what I did.”

One thing JCVD does really well is play with the audience’s expectations. It’s a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie about a bank robbery, so some sort of violence is bound to occur, but El Mechri really keeps you guessing. “One of the important things was to stick to reality,” he says. “It’s an action star getting stuck in a real-life heist. So the bad guys don’t have to be scary. They just have a gun. You can do whatever you want—kickboxing, et cetera—but you can’t run as fast as a bullet. Basically, I didn’t want the action to be incredible. We had this opening sequence to take care of that.”

“The idea was I wanted to start the film with the fact that you know Jean-Claude, you know he’s going to kick ass,” he continues. “Okay, let’s go, let’s do it, but the movie will be about what happens after we say cut on a Jean-Claude Van Damme film—what’s his real life. The single-shot thing, besides being a thrilling thing to do as a director, is just that I want people to realize that what he’s doing is really, really amazing.

“Few people can pull that off—four minutes, on camera, at his age, running and fighting. I wanted people beyond his core audience to respect his work. You don’t have to be pleased by a karate film, but you have to acknowledge the level of work that they’re doing. And the thing is when you’re doing it in a single shot, you can do that. You can feel it. It’s fucking hard to do what they’re doing!”

JCVD OPENS THIS FRIDAY, NOV. 14