Film

Road movies are custom-made for America’s landscape—all those lost highways and easy riders (see page 73)—but the genre has proved to be surprisingly flexible in terms of nationality. Writer-director Bouli Lanners’s tale of two Belgian deadbeats—a car salesman (Lanners) and a junkie (Adde) caught robbing the former’s home—cruising around their home country in a ’79 Chevy has all the hallmarks of our own homegrown odes to two-lane blacktops. The freeways and backstreets might be mistaken for some route below the Mason-Dixon line; even the gnarly garage-rock soundtrack is in English. But the quirky folks they meet along the way, from the naked RV driver named “Alain Delon” to the way-too-intense Good Samaritan (Nahon, channeling his psycho from I Stand Alone), have a distinctly Euro-weird vibe about them. Besides, you don’t have to be from the US of A to search for your own personal lost city of gold.

Lanners’s preference for po-faced Continental quirk eventually wears out its welcome, but Eldorado does have one last trick up its sleeve; just when you think you have this deadpan buddy comedy figured out, the film swerves into unexpectedly pessimistic territory. Fatalistic endings are nothing new, but the way it recasts the movie’s long, strange trip suggests that down is the only direction left.