The Red Dwarf

The Red Dwarf pretends to lofty themes -- something about life's cruelty, lust's fickleness, love's redemption -- but it's just a freak show at its twisted heart. This Belgian film about a lonely, diminutive man, who leads a tormented existence, follows a convoluted path to a cryptic ending hardly worth the wait. Lucien Lhotte is a little guy with a big chip on his shoulder. When his life starts coming apart at the seams, he joins a traveling circus to perform as a height-challenged clown in an act with a Gerard Depardieu look-alike. The Red Dwarf is enticingly shot in black-and-white, but its cinematography can't mask the film's affectations. Perhaps Le Moine aspires to tread where Fellini or Lynch or Jodorowsky have gone -- both successfully and unsuccessfully -- but he hasn't the artistic weight to carry off this film as a dark comedy of human experience. Instead, he's offered a sideshow masquerading as a morality tale. In the end, The Red Dwarf never gets past the impulse to showcase the oddity, an urge that stunts its growth.