An oddball odyssey marked by deadpan comedy tinged with melancholy, Bouli Lanners’ Eldorado charts the preposterous relationship between a man and his would-be robber. Yvan (Lanners) imports, refurbishes, and sells American cars in rural Belgium, a business that the scruffy, portly, distant man seems only moderately interested in. Upon returning home from work, he discovers that his house is in the process of being burgled, and that the culprit is still hiding under his bed. An annoyed standoff ensues, culminating in Yvan thwarting lanky thief Elie (Fabrice Adde) from escaping and, upon realizing that the two-bit criminal is a junkie, kindly offering to give him a ride. Thus begins a contrived road-trip to the home of Elie’s parents on the Belgium-France border in which the duo form an uneasy rapport while all manner of drolly strange happenings frustrate their travels, from Elie’s bizarrely clever trick of taping a drunk driver’s hair to the car ceiling as a means of keeping him awake, to the amusingly random sight of a man emerging from a mobile home in nothing but a hat and sandals and casually introducing himself as “Alain Delon.”
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