Film reviewer Conor Truax noted that L’Autre Laurens (2023) features a “Dadaist sense of causality” but that descriptor doesn’t fully capture how deeply strange the film’s unique rhythms can feel when you’re watching it. This Belgian neo-noir/Western feels very much of the moment and, like many products of the European arthouse circuit, it takes its primary inspiration from American B-movies and classic genre films. It captures a sense of disillusionment and bitterness that is commonly found in films of its ilk but possesses a brash spirit that sets it apart from its contemporaries.
Zita Short had the opportunity to speak to director Claude Schmitz about the film.
Zita Short: What drew you towards telling a story that incorporates typical neo-noir genre tropes?
Claude Schmitz: With The Other Laurens, I wanted to make an investigative film, but one with a double purpose: both the “detective” side, with a detective and all the rest, and an investigation into the question of gender in all its forms. The film questions gender archetypes, in every sense of the word. It tackles several film genres at once, mutating as it develops. I also wanted to work with contrasting effects. It starts out as something of a neo-polar, then turns into a buddy movie between uncle and niece, that then turns into a film noir, that then turns into a B-movie action flick, ending up as a tale or fable. But for me, the whole of The Other Laurens is in fact what it ends with, a tale about the collapse of a way of representing the world that I was given to see throughout my adolescence. It was precisely through North American genre films that I was introduced to this representation, in which there was a whole series of archetypal figures. And I wanted to situate these figures in a territory that was both real and imaginary, playing with pretense. And so I had fun recounting the dissolution of these figures in favor of that of a young woman who is less archetypal, or who in any case gradually manages to extricate herself from this mode of representation, this North American imaginary, and to rid herself of all this heritage, both literally and figuratively.
Zita Short: Which influences have shaped your specific comic sensibility and approach to addressing provocative material?
Claude Schmitz: First of all, there’s a whole narrative architecture that has to do with Shakespeare. Because it must be said that this fable I’m talking about, which takes elements from genre films, in fact carries a kind of meta-dramaturgy that would be the corpus in the broadest sense of Shakespeare’s theater. For example, there are obvious references to Hamlet. The first scene, with the vision of the Spanish gangster, is a direct reference to the first scene of Hamlet, in which two guards think they see Hamlet’s ghost. There’s also the nightclub, the Helsingor, which is in fact the real name of Elsinore, where Hamlet takes place. And the identity crisis of Gabriel Laurens’ character, who becomes his brother’s double, also refers to Hamlet’s own identity crisis. And in this sort of Shakespearean corpus, there are also the characters of the two cops, who function a little like Shakespeare’s jester characters, providing a counterpoint to a dramatic situation while at the same time constituting a sort of variation on the same theme. The situation they see and comment on is the same, and they approach it from a comedic, burlesque angle.
So in The Other Laurens, there’s this idea of creating a whole “meta-dramaturgy” that would also have the effect of producing a baroque object, like Shakespeare’s plays. What is baroque is what we define as bicorn, something that isn’t made up of extremely coherent bits. So I wanted to create an object in which the tragic and the burlesque could coexist, all to the benefit of a fable and a tale. In fairy tales, the characters are archetypal and the objects have an almost magical function. There’s also a fetishistic dimension to this relationship with objects. I liked having these motifs, which also meant that we weren’t dealing with naturalism, that we were in a story and a film that had fun with its own ingredients. And the cops have this function of standing back from the narrative, saying at one point that it’s starting to look like a bad movie. This line is very important, because I’m constantly trying to defuse things. But it’s also linked to the strange sensation of finally having a budget, and being amazed myself at making a “cinema” film. And working with a whole panoply of objects – guns, beautiful cars, helicopters – that belong to a certain idea of cinema.
Zita Short: The almost picaresque storytelling devices employed in the narrative feel out of step with many trends in modern cinema. Do you think this style of narrative has fallen out of fashion in this contemporary era?
Claude Schmitz: I’m not really aware of that… I have the impression that there are many trends in contemporary cinema, going in opposite directions. But a certain type of cinema has interested me and still does… often films from the 70s. Strangely enough, it’s a decade I still can’t quite shake off. There was so much going on in Europe and the United States at that time. Herzog, Pasolini, Peckinpah, Cassavettes, Fassbinder, Fellini … All men, I must admit, and I regret it. After that, I have to say that someone like David Lynch had a very strong impact on me.
You speak of picaresque. But at the same time, there’s a contradiction in the film. There’s a kind of immobility in the action and in the film in general. The characters seem to be going around in circles. The fact that we show them getting into their cars to go from one place to another paradoxically produces this stagnation, as if they were going in circles. It’s a kind of action film that has trouble getting going and never gets going. And in keeping with the idea of this commentary on the aging of genre and/or action films, with aging figures, the fact that it struggles to get off the ground is consistent. Moreover, in the last part of The Other Laurens, with the helicopter escape, there’s also the arrival of a kind of lyricism, coupled with a little irony. And once again, the escape doesn’t really happen, they just jump around and it ends up in the desert. What’s paradoxical is that the film plays with pretenses and stereotypes that belong to American cinema, such as the replica of the White House, which is the Laurens’ home, or the Spanish border, which is treated like the Mexican border. And then there’s the desert at the end, which is in Spain, but is assimilated into the Grand Canyon, which has also been a location for many spaghetti westerns. You never get out of this schizophrenic, mirror-like relationship with the United States.
The Other Laurens continually plays with the irony of looking through a glass or a mirror at the influences that have nurtured him. In the end, just as Gabriel reproduces the same patterns and mistakes as his brother, the film reproduces the same patterns as these stereotypes of American cinema. And however much it tries to distance itself from them, in the end, it’s just repeating the same thing, the same circle. But you never know who’s influencing who, when it comes down to it, as the communicating vessels effect. For example, the “replica” of the White House in the film is in fact the original model used to create the one in Washington DC. The Bardenas Reales desert in Spain obviously existed before spaghetti westerns, but was co-opted to shoot films supposedly set in the USA. There really is a very schizophrenic relationship between European and American cinema in The Other Laurens, which can be likened to the relationship between twin brothers, in which it’s no longer clear who influences the other. It’s also quite obvious in the attitude of the bikers, who keep reacting to the presence of the Americans by saying “they’re not going to take the law into their own hands,” even though they’re wearing all the North American paraphernalia they’ve imported from Hell’s Angels. It’s as if the characters can’t define their own identity. It’s really a film about this quest for identity, which is in itself a question of identity. In fact, all I’m interested in is the “trans” question, transgenderism, transgression, creating narratives that summon up the baroque, the biscorn, the association of things that aren’t meant to cohabit a priori.
Zita Short: How do you think that Belgian cinema is viewed abroad and what accounts for the enormous popularity of Belgian arthouse films in the Anglosphere?
Claude Schmitz: I don’t know what Belgian cinema means. If you look at what’s being done in Belgium, it’s hard to say what links all the cinematographic proposals. Belgium is a strange, composite, fragmented territory. It’s almost a non-country. It’s more like an idea… What’s certain is that this country is so blurred, that its identity is so strange, that it creates peculiar forms. Perhaps this strangeness is the source of baroque objects…
Zita Short: One also assumes that the Western genre served as a significant influence on the thematic material featured in the film. Why have the genre conventions and moral conflicts that serve as the root of many Westerns continued to endure through the ages?
Claude Schmitz: The Western is a typically American genre. It was therefore somewhat inevitable that it should appear as a watermark in the film. As I was saying, for example, I wanted to end the film in a desert, which is a place in Europe where spaghetti Westerns were made. It’s hard to miss this kind of evocation if you’re making a film that looks at how European and American cinema have influenced each other. Mirror effects, including stylistic ones, are everywhere.
Zita Short: In reviews of the film, much has been made of the dichotomy between European and American perspectives on the concept of the American Dream. Why do you think that the contrast between these outlooks remains so pronounced?
Claude Schmitz: In my opinion, the American dream is a European dream and the European dream is an American dream. The two feed each other. We live on myths and stories. These are ideas. Everyone looks at the other’s story. The film is about that. How our stories are made by others and vice versa. It’s an intertwining that’s impossible to disentangle.
Zita Short: How did you settle on the idea of drawing 9/11 and, more broadly, the atmosphere of post-9/11 hysteria in the United States into the film’s plot?
Claude Schmitz: In the 80s and 90s I went to boarding school and the movies we were shown in the evenings were American B-movies. Stallone, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and so on. Films we called “Reagannian.” Not very clever stuff that glorified masculine power while offering a Manichean discourse, a caricatured vision of the world, and a rather primitive patriotism. Without realizing it, my imagination was colonized by these patriarchal narratives, and it took me a long time to take a critical look at these films.
I’m not saying I was totally fooled… but all the same, these films imposed a vision of the world. On September 11, when I was barely twenty years old, I saw, beyond the tragedy, this power that had been conveyed to me so many times shattered. Literally, both towers collapsed as I opened my eyes. I understood that the colossus had feet of clay, and that all the tales of power I’d been told were lies. I’m obviously not talking about conspiracy theories. I’m talking about what fathers give their sons or daughters to see. I use the term “fathers” because, at the time, these were essentially stories – movies – invented by men. Power stories are all lies.
And the film I made is about that. In a way, Jade’s character is a bit like me. During the film, she painfully realizes that her father is lying to her, and that the figures around her who stand in for him are lying too. So the world falls apart for her… but that finally leaves room for her to start inventing her own stories. So the film is about the end of a world. The world I knew as a teenager, populated by dominant males, father figures… all the characters you’d find in the B-movies I was talking about. You have to kill the father, as they say. The “father” for me was these movies I watched when I was a teenager, and these movies happened to be American. So as I wanted to be quite honest in the film, and even though I disguised myself as a girl – Jade – I wanted September 11 to be part of the story, because for me this tragic event also represented a breaking point in my way of believing or not believing in stories.
