"There should always be a first death. Otherwise, nothing happens. Otherwise it's never a problem. Otherwise, everything is always on. No. There must always be someone dying first."
At school, the bullies are out for blood and the good guys can do nothing about it. Back home, mum is helpless, while the absent father is guilt-ridden. In the community, social services are compassionately indifferent and the medical establishment takes too stoic a view to be of practical help. I ask you, then: What chance does an autistic teenager have for survival?
Belgian director Nic Balthazar asks the same from all of us in his directorial deut, the relevant and psychologically rich Ben X, inspired by a true story of a teenager who committed suicide after years of harassment in school. The question has haunted Balthazar over a number of years and across multiple storytelling platforms. Ben X started life in 2002 as "Nothing Was All He Said," Balthazar's debut novel for "youngsters who do not read." He then adapted it for the stage as a solo performance piece, before drawing on both his works for a feature film.
While the fictional and dramatic roots are instantly recognizable - the language is gloriously literary and delivered in one long monologue - Ben X also stakes its own claim on the big screen. Balthazar is a visual documentarian, tracing, preserving and playing back footage of an autistic teen's life.
Ben is one of two children raised by a divorced mother in a bleak, industrial European town. His daily dose of bullying starts well before he makes it to school, usually at the bus stop or at some point during the ride. Ben retreats into the on-line gaming world of ArchLord, where he has reinvented himself as a monster-slaying warrior. It's there that he meets Scarlite, a soulful love interest whose identity, if not actual existence, is in doubt. Ben reaches the breaking point after a particularly devastating incident of bullying in which he is stripped from the waist down by his classmates.
What follows is a revenge tale with some unexpected and some predictable twists. Yes, the narrative becomes more emotionally manipulative as the film reaches its final reel, teasing us with intolerable cruelty and unbearable tenderness. And there's a whiff of an after-school special, with teenage suicide and cyber-bullying among the film's "issues." The overall effect, however, is to capture a life of humiliations with dignity. And with an accusatory flair, I must add: Balthazar loves pointing fingers at those who have failed Ben, though (save for the more vicious bullies) he stops short of condemning them outright.
Withholding moral judgement is not the only tall order in the film. Ben X has an extremely ambitious emotional scope, almost all of which has to be filtered through the actor playing the title role. This is the kind of film that lives and dies on one casting decision, and Balthazar has struck gold with Greg Timmermans. His gripping performance not only captures Ben, but offers a panoramic view of the world in which he lives. We are, after all, meant to see this story from Ben's own idiosyncratic perspective.
It's not the overarching naturalism of the performance that stands out but the conceptual breakdown of the portrayal into smaller, loosely connected segments. Just as Ben enters the on-line world to discover who he can be, an audience journeys slowly through the corridors of Ben's tightly guarded mind - a mind that one doctor describes as a computer that has been configured differently. Timmermans is capably supported by Marijke Pinoy as a mother who decides not to suffer in silence and by the lovely Laura Verlinden as the apparitional Scarlite.
Ben X generated some buzz throughout 2008 on the festival circuits for integrating scenes from the virtual world of on-line gaming into the main story. As much as these flights of fantasy reveal essential clues about Ben's psyche, Timmermans and Balthazar do better whenever they place him in his immediate familial or romantic surroundings. In purely dramatic terms, Ben at home and Ben in love trump Ben as the virtual warlord. Perhaps it's that old-fashioned human touch that no computer game and no second, third or fourth life can replace.
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