Point of departure and source of inspiration for this essayist film was the well-known medieval painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Pieter Brueghel. Claudio Pazienza: ‘It is a painting that has long haunted my imagination. Intuitively it seems to summarise an endless number of issues. Too many issues. Why do so many personal questions seem to crystallise out around this painting in particular? It was my intention to encompass the painting by Brueghel, to take it apart, to cultivate it; from the singular to the plural, and from the present to the past.’An ambitious film because, even though the starting point is ‘small’, the consequences, like the ripples after a stone is thrown in the water, are large and multiple. Psychoanalysts, philosophers, party chairmen, a baron, a musician, a writer, a baker and a notary are presented, and even prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene is asked several pregnant questions: how do we look, what do we see? Deliberately or accidentally, this provides a snapshot of contemporary Belgium too. Claudio Pazienza also set out on a self-investigation, portraying his parents and himself. Strikes, the Dutroux affair, the problem of unemployment; the maker invites the viewer to reflect and to look, and especially to think. Yet the film is not heavy. Claudio Pazienza himself calls it ‘a funny, not entirely intimate nor scandalous public film report’.
