Ben X

Your estimation of Ben X will probably depend to a significant extent on where you sit on life’s timeline. Based on a novel by the director, the story of a young man with Asperger's Syndrome who is bullied at high school, it is less successful as a portrait of someone with the affliction (Jennifer Venditti’s 2008 documentary, Billy The Kid, about a young male who suffered from it is my benchmark here) than as a rather didactic but nevertheless quite poignant account of teen alienation.

Asperger's Syndrome prevents its victims from comprehending and experiencing “normal” emotional responses. Understandably, this causes social problems for them and leads to ostracism but in Nic Balthazar's film Ben’s Frankensteinian demeanour and the merciless bullying that he receives from his gormless classmates hardly seems credible unless the Belgians are an unusually callous lot and his mother is an extremely bad judge of educational institutions.

If this is a one-note, perhaps even skewed, portrait of the disease, and more of a metaphor for perceived “difference”  of whatever stripe, the director also has trouble with developing much of a story. Ben finds solace from his real world by playing an interactive computer game, 'Archlord', which serves as a parallel universe to which he can escape. This is quite effectively realized visually and when combined with retrospective interviews with Ben's parents, teachers and schoolmates serves well to suggest an impending self-immolating Armageddon such as we are familiar with from our daily papers but it also tends to the reiterative as the interface is played over and over.

There is a nice twist that belies the narrative’s implication but the surprise is predicated on the fact that we have been so assiduously led to expect otherwise by what has gone before and the rather twee ending hardly stacks up from a realistic perspective (not that that is the only perspective, to be sure). Ben X is a well-wrought fantasy that probably speaks more to the teen heart than the adult mind.

 

Want something different?