For her first stab behind the camera, veteran Belgian actress Veerle Baetens, who’s best known for co-starring in the Oscar-nominated country music tearjerker, The Broken Circle Breakdown, certainly hasn’t taken the easy road. By adapting writer Lize Spit’s 2016 Flemish-language novel, The Melting, she’s chosen an extremely tough topic that requires a sizeable amount of gravitas, not to mention the ability to direct young performers through some very uncomfortable situations.
To that extent, When it Melts (Het Smelt) is an admirable and well-acted debut that stares childhood trauma in the face and bravely refuses to look away. But it’s also quite the downer, following the harrowing story of a young woman in her 20s who recalls events that took place when she was 13 years old and her life very much fell apart.
Premiering in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, the film is likely to receive some attention, especially in Belgium, for its hard-hitting subject matter and the way Baetens manages to handle it with both tenderness and sangfroid. Other territories may be more difficult to crack, especially in today’s rather shaky arthouse market.
Cutting between the present and the past, the script, which Baetens co-wrote with Maarten Loix (Mobile Home), follows its heroine, Eva, both as a teenager (where she’s played by the excellent Rosa Marchant) and then over a decade later (where she’s played by the equally strong Charlotte De Bruyne) as she recalls what happened to her as a child.
What triggers all the flashbacks is a celebration, taking place in the present-day, that’s set on the country farm where Eva used to play as a kid with her best buddies, Tim (Anthony Vyt) and Laurens (Matthijs Meertens). Back then the group called themselves “The Three Musketeers,” and during the summer of Eva’s thirteenth year, they’re doing their best to forget the fact that Tim’s older brother, Jan, tragically died in a drowing accident the year before.
When we see her in the present, Eva lives by herself in Brussels and seems far from the somewhat carefree teenage girl we’re first introduced to. How she got that way is the mystery at the heart of When It Melts, which withholds a major piece of information until the penultimate scene, at which point everything becomes clear. It’s not necessarily the most complex narrative and we spend much of the film waiting for that awful moment to occur, but when it does it bathes everything we’ve witnessed in an inescapably tragic light.
Baetens reveals a deft hand for guiding the young and very courageous Marchant, as well as her co-stars, toward the inevitable, and there is rarely a false note in the performances of all the youngsters. While De Bruyne does a convincing job portraying Eva as a traumatized adult, some of the older characters, including Eva’s alcoholic mom (Naomi Velissariou) and hot tempered dad (Sebastien Dewaele) are a little less subtle at times — although they rarely appear in a movie that focuses almost solely on the cruelty of teenagers towards one another.
Such cruelty appears in small doses at first, with Eva suffering occasional slights from Tim and Laurens, who let her hang around and watch as they play a lewd guessing game with local girls. When a horse-riding blond, Elise (Charlotte Van Der Eecken), pops into the picture, the boys quickly become smitten with her, as does Eva in a sense. At that point the inevitable downward spiral begins, leading to a confrontation between the four of them that will scar Eva so deeply that she becomes a social outcast in the years that follow.
The film’s title refers to a riddle, at once simple and shocking, that Eva learns from her dad and then asks others to solve. It’s a grim little secret that she carries around with her and that very much dooms her from the start. As much as Baetens shows real compassion toward Eva and the other kids as well, her movie offers very little in terms of hope or redemption. When It Melts is far from heartless, but the world it depicts is not one that Eva or anyone else should have to live in.
Director: Veerle Baetens
Screenplay: Veerle Baetens, Maarten Loix, based on the novel ‘The Melting’ by Lize Spit
Cast: Rosa Marchant, Charlotte De Bruyne, Ambder Metdepenningen, Matthijs Meertens, Anthony Vyt, Sebastien Dewaele, Naomi Velissariou
Producer: Bart Van Langendonck
Cinematography: Frederic van Zandycke
Production design: Robert Nuytens
Costume design: Manu Verschueren
Editing: Thomas Pooters
Music: Bjorn Eriksson
Production companies: Savage Film, Versus Production (Belgium), PRPL (Netherlands)
World sales: The Party Film Sales
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Dramatic Competition)
In Flemish, French
111 minutes
