Tim Mielants's De Patrick | Patrick (2020)

This is Belgian Tim Mielants's first feature film, set in a nudist camp, and in Flemish, French and English: it was inspired by Mielants's experience of a naturist site in the Pyrenees, although the setting here is the Ardennes. And although nudism isn't obligatory fat bellies and dangling penises are all over the place and provide a humorous backcloth to a movie very much concerned with existential anguish.

The main character is Patrick (Kevin Janssens) whose ailing father Rudy (Josse De Pauw) owns the site, which has regular meetings run on a highly organised, most business-like fashion, everything being taken ultra-seriously: the fact that almost all the members of the meetings as completely naked evidently makes this very amusing.

Patrick not only helps in the running of the camp site but also lives in his workshop where he makes extremely well crafted furniture which he'd prefer to give away rather than sell. And then he loses his favourite hammer and his father dies. The hammer becomes not only a symbol of paternal loss but a vital part of the grieving process – it seems that finding the hammer will finally put his father to rest: it can no coincidence that 'marteau', French for hammer, is also an old-fashioned French slang word for 'crazy'. Come to that, the 'De Patrick' could even indicate 'On Patrick', as if it were a philosophical tract.

But I prefer the 'de' as an indicator of aristocracy, as in 'de Musset', 'de Vigny', etc: Patrick is heir to his father's property, the camp site. And the scheming Herman (Pierre Bokma), wife of Liliane (Ariane van Vliet) – with whom Patrick has boring (for him) sex – is planning to take over the camp site by proving that the grieving hammerless Patrick is unfit to run it.  There follows a naked fight  which has none of the sensuality of Ken Russell's nude male fighting in Women in Love, but is in fact very violent although it finishes in comical fashion with the caravan tipping up on its side.

Eventually the hammer is discovered: it has been taken by an outsider to use to crush someone's skull. The murderer is discovered, Patrick returns to the camp site and is greeted by everyone as before. But he'll never get his hammer back.

One of the posters used to advertise the film is a mock-up of the Kinks's album Percy, although with a hammer used in the genital area instead of a fig leaf (and a bigger belly): the Kinks's music was used in the film Percy (1971), which is about a naked man falling and mutilating the penis of the protagonist, who has to have a penis graft.