The crisis facing a couple of middle-aged Belgian tech bros in the 1990s might be better suited to a European streaming-TV drama – maybe with the two antiheroes’ travails confined to the first episode, setting up a lengthier intergenerational drama taking us to the present. Nonetheless, here it is: a feature film in the Berlin competition from screenwriter Angelo Tijssens and director Anke Blondé, handsomely produced and shot, and impeccably acted. But it’s also weirdly parochial, leaving you with the sense that it has not reached beyond its immediate concerns; and it’s not clear as to why, exactly, we need a fictionalised crisis from the 90s inspired by a real-life financial fraud scandal.
Well, perhaps the point is that very smallness and sadness: a pathetic tale of the first, almost-forgotten dotcom bust, which holds an omen for our AI-obsessed present. Arieh Worthalter and Jan Hammenecker play Geert and Luc, two balding guys who, in the late 90s, are Belgium’s pinup boys of tech innovation. Their startup company has gone public and made them both very rich, and all their local friends, family and businesses have plunged every cent of their savings into shares. Geert and Luc are now poised to turn the mud of Flanders into a European Silicon Valley.
There is some droll comedy as the two host a dynamic corporate presentation in which, to gasps from the assembled suit-wearing attendees, they unveil what in 2026 looks like hilariously clunky voice-to-text hardware. Steve Jobs these guys ain’t. But in the audience is investigative journalist Aaron (Anthony Welsh), who confronts them with the awful truth: for years they have been fabricating profits to boost their share price, secure lucrative government grants and, on some unconscious level, bolster their own ridiculous egos. His story will break on Monday, leaving them and their investors penniless, and with Geert and Luc facing a prison sentence.
The film follows the calvary of their empty Sunday before the police arrive, as they scramble around individually for a way out, burning and shredding bales of documents, with Luc suspecting that Geert is going to sell him down the river. Both have secret stashes of cash. Geert, a gay man, is in a casual relationship with his driver-assistant Kenneth (Thibaud Dooms) who, however, has no place in Geert’s new scheme: jetting off that very day to a South American country with no extradition arrangements with Belgium. Geert pays a last visit to his sister, who runs a bakery and doesn’t know she faces ruin because of her investment in his worthless firm, but he can’t warn her to sell for fear of providing evidence of insider trading.
Luc has family: a dad in a care home to whom he pays one final, poignant visit to ask if the old man is “proud of him”, plus a wife who tolerates him and an estranged grownup daughter who does not. His final emotional breakdown-slash-epiphany comes when his BMW gets stuck in a muddy field and he staggers out into the rain and gazes at a couple of cows, who gaze incuriously back. Is this the brutal, unglamorous truth? His dreams of a glitzy future here mocked by the reality of an economy which was for centuries suitable only for agriculture? Do these cows embody a primitive innocence which he can only see now?
The “dust” of the title is that dust into which all of these vain dreams of riches will crumble. Maybe “mud” would have served just as well.
