The Sexual Life of the Belgians
The Sexual Life of the Belgians
| 09 June 1994 (USA)
The Sexual Life of the Belgians Trailers

Jan Bucquoy narrates the story of his sexual life to age 28, imagining his conception (parents drunk, the encounter lasting ten seconds) and reporting his first orgasm (at the hands of Eddy, in a beach-side caravan, as they watch Laurel and Hardy), his comparative experiences with girls, and his move from Harelbeck to Brussels. There he meets Greta, bartender at a Bohemian cafe, who teaches him the Kama Sutra, the naked Esther, who reads him stories, and Thérèse, his wife for three years. They split after two children; he moves to a small flat, writes pornography to pay the bills, works sporadically on a novel, espouses anarchism, and meets more women. His self-confidence grows.

Reviews
TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film
Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.
Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
info-6595 This movie reminds me of Balzac, the little hero Lucien (here Jan) who starts at a remote village in the deep of Flanders and moves to the great Paris (Brussels). It is the astonishing encounter of the fourth kind with beautiful ladies and the fauna of the night crowd of a roaring city. Artists, whores, poets and all the like mix up in this beautiful expressed and imaged close up of the capital of the Belgians in the seventies. This movie has nothing to do about sex, it is just a romantic comedy of life. This movie remains actual by its surprising flair and capturing of mind and imaginative dialogs. In some Line it is difficult to translate this film. One of the best Belgian movies I ever saw, deserves a 9.
rmutt First movie of the belgian conceptual artist and disrespectful director Jan Bucquoy. This film starts the series of the sexual life of the belgians, composed by 4 full-lenght films that introduce subversion in belgian cinema history, also whit an independent production system. You'll not find any explicit sexual sequence, you'll find the representation of a complex ideological system, the history of a non conventional life, the alternative vision of a country that hide aspirations of general revolution of life. Bucquoy build a conceptual cinema that try to destroy the "representation" of the spectacular cinema in order to leave all the place to the ideas. The word "sexual" hides the words "politics","art", "desire", "communication"... it hides all words to reveal the language free by all social deviation. This first movie show 28 years of the life of a man who try to find the best answer to the only really important philosophical question, as the french writer Camus wrote: is it worth living life or not? From his little village in Flandre to Bruxelles, trough sexual relationships, political activism, literature dreams, you will see the existential journey of Jan Bucquoy (the name of the protagonist) who try to grow in the body and in the intellect.
stevenlemahieu Road movie on the road of life in Belgium of the sixties. Cool! Dark comedy about a writer who wants to become world-famous by leaving his village and his family and going to Brussels. I like his conservative father who is regularly drunk and his aunt who proclaims a big future for him. His sexual initiation at a camping with the movies of Laurel and Hardy at the background is a bad start for him! The movie changes of tone in the second part and becomes more bitter. You can still laugh with the many sketches in which the main actor staggers between self-indulgence and self-critical spot. Splendid photography.
sharptongue This film starts as a rapid-fire series of childhood memories, narrated by the main char. These episodes all have a sexual flavour. My favourite is the beautiful aunt who never wears knickers and parades around in the nude in front of the young boy, who concentrates only on his painting. But it goes downhill fast after that. The story completely loses focus, and is a lot less sexy. Disappointing, after such a promising start.