The Flemish Schneider and the Dutch Bax
will fight a real Benelux grudge match, whether they want to or not. Instead of
a steel cage, they will fight it out in the Dutch wetlands, using their weapon
of choice: rifles with sniper-scopes. They are both hitman contracted by their
agent to rub out each other in Alex van Warmerdam’s Schneider vs. Bax (trailer here), which releases today on DVD from Film
Movement.
Schneider is a family man, with two
adoring young daughters and a lovely wife who thinks he works as a
troubleshooting engineer for a filling station company. The crusty booze and
narcotics soused Bax is also sort of a family man, but his semi-estranged grown
daughter Francesca bitterly resents him for being a chaotic, ineffectual
parent. The hung-over Bax forgot Francesca will be visiting his ultra-white
Ikea-looking cottage, so he will have to evict his young gothy lover tout
suite. It also slipped his fog-encrusted mind that the shadowy Mertens would be
luring his target right to his doorstep this very same morning.
Although his head is clear, Schneider is
also having a hard morning. Since Martens neglected to tell him the surrounding
marshes were protected, the visiting team hitman got spotted by a nature
warden. That forces Schneider to return to his storage facility to change his
disguise and vehicle. Things get even more complicated when a prostitute breaks
in, hoping to hide from her abusive pimp.
Schneider
vs. Bax is
sort of like the art-house theater version of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” but van Warmerdam’s conception of
slapstick humor truly has existential bite. The Dutch marshland is also wildly
cinematic, adding something to S v. B akin
to what the East Texas scrubland did for Blood
Simple.
Thesp-helmer van Warmerdam is wonderfully
cynical and dissolute as the world-weary Bax. In contrast, Tom Dewispelaere is rather
rigid and aloof as the detail-oriented Schneider. They clearly have very
different approaches to their job. Of course, nobody is really in the right
here, but the survivor survives. Frankly, we are not intended to take a rooting
interest. Instead, we should really just relax and enjoy as van Warmerdam rains
down one-darned-thing-after-another on his morally compromised characters.
