If there is one thing that Belgium is worse at than chess, it’s probably directing films. But like we have Colle and O’Kelly, so do we have the Dardenne brothers and Raoul Servais. The former are mostly known for their dramas and winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes twice, the latter is mostly known for short films like Harpya, about a bird woman with a voracious appetite, Sirene, about the discovery of a mermaid, and Chromophobia, our subject for today.1
It was decorated at the 27th Venice film festival in 1966 and holds, at the time of writing a solid 7 on IMDB. 2 It tells the story of a happy, colourful village that gets invaded by a bunch of uniform and unicolour soldiers that do away with all the colours and commit untold atrocities.
Atrocities against Caïssa, that is! In fact, they commit some of the worst horrors we’ve ever seen — and that’s saying something. 3
Gah! Okay, okay, you can turn a balloon into a ball and chains, you can shoot the stained glass windows down, you can imprison a painter for painting — but at least respect our game. It’s just black and white, for God’s sake!
The board is the wrong size, there are no kings, the right-hand corner square is the wrong colour, there’s a pawn on the first, and there’s a pawn on the last rank. How wrong can a position possibly get? The only way this could be worse is if they’d also make an illegal move. Which they promptly do, of course. white takes all three c-pawns with his rook and turns them into decorations.4
All hope is lost and the world is doomed.
Realism: -/5 I’d rather believe that some army will come around to vacuum all the colour out of the world than this.
Probable winner: There are only losers here. I think they wanted to the colour gone from the world in order to hide the red hue of shame on their cheeks.
1. [Incidentally, he had also made one feature-length film, Taxandria, which could very aptly have been named Chronophobia.] ↩
2. [Which is good — you don’t want a gaseous 6.] ↩
3. [Which is so obviously a literal tautology that pointing it out is a figurative tautology.] ↩
4. [But, instead, he deserves to be corated for his misdeeds.] ↩