‘Man Bites Dog’ (NC-17)

What a delightful, happy boy Benoit was. How charming and bright and singular.

This is what the grandparents and mother of the hero in the weirdly funny Belgian comedy "Man Bites Dog" have to say about their darling, now-grown-up boy. And yes, we would certainly have to agree that Benoit is a unique fellow. He plays the piano, spouts poetry and discourses on the aethestic corruption of senior citizen housing. All in all, he's good, if somewhat domineering, company.

That is, if you don't mind his being a mass murderer.

If you can imagine such a thing as "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" dressed up in art house haute couture and staged as a drolly surrealistic comedy of murders, then you have an idea of what's up in "Man Bites Dog." Directed by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde -- a trio of Belgians who also wrote, shot, produced and play star roles -- the film is a mock documentary about the making of a cinema verite documentary about an extremely sociable psychopathic rapist, murderer and thief. And clearly, its goal is to shock us into taking some kind of moral position on the remorseless cruelty we're shown -- to take the audience to the very edge of nausea and force us to either consider our responses or run screaming for the exits.

Certainly, disgust would be an appropriate response to this provocative but rather academic study of violence in the movies. Yet it's hard to work up much of a response of any kind to these casual terrors. Ben is a killer. That's his job: killing people. Old people, young people, people who just happen to cross his path. And from all outward signs, he's extremely happy in his work. Not five seconds into the film we see him strangle a young woman on a train, pulling her into a compartment and grinning like a kid on his birthday as his victim's life drains away. The next thing you know he's crouched on a riverbank, explaining the proper technique for weighing down a dead body.

Ben -- who is played with awe-inspiring insouciance by the lanky, eagle-beaked Poelvoorde -- says he likes to start the month by murdering a postman because that's when the old folks get their pension checks in the mail. Older people are prime targets for Ben. They're easy and they've got dough, he explains.

All these activities are dutifully recorded by a two-man camera crew (Belvaux and Bonzel) that begins its project innocently enough as neutral reporters but turn gradually into accomplices. At first the line between recording the action and participating in it is blurry -- for example, when Ben uses the crew to convince an elderly victim that he's making a film about loneliness and old age. Later, when the crew members take their turns raping a young woman, the line vanishes completely, replaced by a glib formula that equates the artist with the criminal and the criminal with the audience.

Though all this is meant to be both sick and sick-making, in reality it's too over-intellectualized, too theoretical to be genuinely horrifying. The presence of the camera is supposed to give dimension and meaning to these commonplace atrocities. But using the film crew as an intermediary between Ben and us does more to confuse the issue than to clarify it.

Supposedly, "Man Bites Dog" is breaking new ground by audaciously asking moviegoers to laugh along with Ben as he goes about his murderous business. But the movie is so cool and tidy and ironic that Ben's crimes are completely without emotional weight. The victims suffer their various, awful ends, but since they were never anything other than victims to begin with, our only response is indifference. Shot in artful black-and-white, the murders have been reduced to trivial and even boring performance pieces.

Watching the crew as it records Ben's barbarism, we are confronted with our role as spectators. A slew of questions arises: Do we condone what we witness? And, as vicarious participants, are we not indirectly responsible -- and, therefore, indirectly, vicariously guilty?

Strangely enough, the filmmakers don't appear to have a strong point of view one way or the other. They make Ben an almost irresistible, larger-than-life figure -- he has a ball, this monster -- then they ask us to feel creepy for responding to his peculiar brand of criminal joie de vivre. What the filmmakers seem to be saying is that we've become desensitized to violence because of its abundance in the media, and that, as a result, the value of human life has been devalued. But instead of guiding us to this point, these irreverent Belgians simply adopt it as a foregone conclusion.

The filmmakers want desperately to make some kind of statement about the nature of violence and its place in the movies. About the best they can come up with is a generalization about the banality of evil. But that, by now, is a banality too.

"Man Bites Dog," in French with subtitles, is rated NC-17.