MEDIATHEK

A man, a woman and a girl share a house. The man spends his days in a company’s ice cellar. To kill time he collects newspaper cuttings on all sorts of gruesome events. In the meantime, his hyperactive wife loses herself in organising the household and making children’s clothes that she sells through her brother-in-law. The housemaid who assists her plays is the main focus of the man’s desires. In Menuet, this classic triangular relationship unfolds into a grand tragedy on a domestic scale.
 
 The LOD composer Daan Janssens and director Fabrice Murgia are tackling the existential issues in Louis Paul Boon’s novel. The simple facts are presented three times in succession, each time through the eyes of one of the characters. This gives this banal situation a tragic depth. Solitude, shame and sexual desire are the basis for the 3D vision of man shown here. Menuet sketches a portrait of lonely people who hover between the normal and the abnormal, between speaking and silence. Daan Janssens and Fabrice Murgia go in search of this tension in the conviction that real life lies in this in-between zone.