The shaggy-haired, bearded Didier (Heldenberg), a banjo player in a Bluegrass/Country combo, meets the heavily tattooed Elise and they fall in love. Despite being at loggerheads when it comes to belief in God - she likes to think there's one, he's adamant there's not - the relationship grows strong and results in marriage and the birth of Maybelle (Cattrysse). However, Maybelle is diagnosed with cancer and while her suffering allows Elise to embrace God's love, Didier retreats into hate.
While the Annie Hall/Blue Valentine fractured timeline isn't necessarily original, it does throw up surprises that a chronological narrative would not. Felix Van Groeningen opens with news that Maybelle needs chemotherapy before cutting back to the first night Didier took Elise home. The Broken Circle Breakdown continues in that vein, mixing heady heights with sudden lows; the tactic nurtures an environment where the audience is emotionally raw, unable to predict and ready itself for what is to come and results in those sad scenes hitting home a little harder.
While the style gives the film an oomph it wouldn't normally have, it also continues far past most movies would have wrapped up; it doesn't outstay its welcome but shows bravery in exploring what happens to a family unit post such trauma: the guilt of being happy, the shame of an orgasm.
There's a little too much Bluegrass and Country for my liking - Van Groeningen doesn't need an excuse to get the cast to burst into song and sometimes it feels like they're added to paper over some plot-thin moments - and the writer-director can sometimes veer close to soapbox ranting when he allows Didier the room and time to explode during a gig and angrily dissect an inconsistent bible's insistence to love a malevolent God. Later Didier loses himself to hate when George Bush Snr. appears on television to veto a bill for stem cell research, research Didier feels might have helped his daughter.
However, such is Heldenberg's pained anguish in these scenes, and Elise's pity for her disintegrating husband - her search for comfort in her beliefs have an eerily cultish calmness about it - it's easy to forget that they can be mere mouthpieces for what irks Van Groeningen.
There will be tears.
