The Weeping Walk

Christine’s dead and the family is planning her funeral, but nothing goes according to plan. That would be the premise of Dimitri Verhulst’s directorial debut The Weeping Walk, which has just had its international première in Tallinn Black Nights; First Features competition. Unlike real life where a funeral going haywire usually results in stress, tensions and general unpleasantness, in the movies that cliché is usually a promise of great fun.

Part of the reason why we should expect the unexpected with Christine’s funeral is her life in the first place. Verhulst reveals the details and the quirks of it slowly and patiently through the characters’ conversations. She was married to Bas (Peter Van Den Begin), they loved and respected each other, but with some distance and a lack of affection between them. Nevertheless, they had two daughters and an adoptive son and a seemingly stable family life. But she was also the kind of person who would play wheelchair basketball even if she were not disabled and who had a habit of drinking her favourite cocktail – called “Multi-Culti” and made up of all the hard liquor one could find, but without adding any fruit to it – until she would dance stripped down to her underwear.

The trouble with the funeral starts with the re-emergence of the adoptive son Antoine (Emiel Vandenberghe) who left the family a couple of years earlier following a “nudge” by Bas. Then the notary (Bert Haelvoet) says the news that she wanted to be buried in a town none of the family members has ever even heard of, so the whole funeral gang decides to follow the hearse driven by the cynically wise Frido (Dominique Van Malder) on the titular walk. The thing is, what should be a couple of hours’ drive turns into a days-long pilgrimage that will reveal some hidden family secrets. And the “entourage” consists of some unknown members, including the childhood friend of the deceased and a mysterious woman (Hilde Heijnen) unrelated to anybody from the crowd, along with the expected participants – the daughters and Christine’s wheelchair-bound sister Sherry (Marijke Pinoy).

What we get is a slowly driven (pun intended) road movie that blends comedy and drama, while it milks its laughs, some of them very loud, from the perfect timing of the revelations and from the perfectly nuanced relationships between the characters in Verhulst’s own script. The filmmaker and his editor Manu Van Hove are also aware that they cannot keep the viewers in the constant state of LOL, so they know when to tone it down, make a break or simply change the rhythm by throwing curveballs in the form of dance sequences, which arrive seemingly out of the blue. The refined camerawork of Meno Mans also helps, and so does the inspired acting by the whole extended cast.

The problem is that Verhulst does not know to stop at the “sweet spot”, or even when enough is enough, so he raises the stakes constantly by steering the whole thing to the direction of pure ridiculousness of the circus kind that actually starts – in a circus. Luckily, he at least knows to get out of the game while he is still winning, so the excess of the last 15 or so minutes the film could do without does not tank The Weeping Walk completely, although it lowers it from the level of a very good film to just a good one.