A sharp-eyed but sweet-natured movie that has a fine time poking fun at the increasingly bizarre ways people jockey for their 15 minutes in the sun, Everybody Famous offers a little something for almost everyone. The film does an admirable job walking the line between quirky and cute, never tipping too far over on either side of the line. It does this in much the same crowd-pleasing, critic-proof way as The Full Monty, Strictly Ballroom, The Castle and so many other recent British and Australian comedies of recent years.
The thing of it is, though, that Everybody Famous is not English at all, or even Australian; director Dominique Deruddere's film is a considerably rarer commodity around these parts, a Belgian import (and an Oscar-nominated one, at that) — although outside of the subtitles and a few specific cultural quirks, we might easily imagine that the movie is taking place in some small, working-class town just about anywhere.
That's a large part of the appeal of Everybody Famous, a little foreign film with a nonthreatening, universal sensibility that feels almost mainstream. The movie opens soon at Channelside, right along with such high profile summer fare as A.I., The Score and (yikes) Cats and Dogs — a marquee that's beginning to show some dangerous cracks in the noble ambitions of this new multiplex to run a totally non-mainstream shop.
Right now, of course, that's just a speculation. Bear in mind, though, that unless local movie lovers (and our local media) actually begin to actively support the brave, genuinely non-mainstream films Channelside continues to bring in every week — there could very well come a day in the not-too-distant-future when Cats and Dogs is the norm at Channelside, just as it is in every other faceless megaplex in the Bay area. Not a pretty picture.
Anyway, back to Everybody Famous. Don't let the "mainstream" tag scare you off. This isn't the most original or stylish or dramatically potent movie you'll ever see (not by a long shot) but Deruddere's film possesses all sorts of charms of its own. Jesse De Pauw is hugely appealing as Jean Vereecken, a working stiff and frustrated songwriter whose biggest thrill in life is making up little ditties that he hums, tunelessly but vigorously, into a tape recorder. Actually, that's Jean's second biggest thrill. His real reason for living is his daughter Marva (Eva Van der Gucht). She's a pudgy, gap-toothed teen whom Jean envisions as a world-famous pop singer.
Marva's not entirely lacking in talent, but she does lack confidence and charm, and her habitual surliness seems just one sign of how intensely uncomfortable she is in her own skin. Marva fails miserably, repeatedly, at the karaoke-style musical impersonation contests that Jean pushes her into — and yet, when she's safely tucked away behind a puppet stage at a children's performance, her singing voice is lovely. "Kids appreciate me for what I am," she tells a friend. "Adults only watch the outside."
True as that undoubtedly is, Everybody Famous gives us plenty of reasons to watch the outside and has a lot of fun doing so. Deruddere has a field day holding up to the light the various grotesqueries and banalities of these working class, small-town Belgian folk. Marva gets the brunt of the attention, gobbling down the huge breakfasts her father makes for her, or primping before a mirror, decked out like Madonna, complete with pointy-breasted corset (jumbo-size of course).
There's are lots of moments of considerable warmth and affection here too, of course, and it's finally a feeling of upbeat satisfaction with which the movie leaves us. The plot, such as it is, amounts to a sort of subdued screwball comedy, with Jean hatching a harebrain scheme to kidnap a famous Flemish pop singer and hold her captive until the singer's unscrupulous manager agrees to make Marva a star. Much of what happens along the way is fairly predictable, but it's all handled with liveliness, charm and almost no pretense of being anything other than what it is. By the end of the movie, even the cops are giving would-be kidnapper Jean a standing ovation, and odds are that you may feel like joining them.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2001.
