Eagle Way (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Thailand/HK/USA): Examples of a Bicameral Mind

Little did I know this gem would be the next entry in the Cannes 2010 next actor/director/actor ouevre. And what to choose in this insane medley from the market, about which Van Damme said, before the film, that it expressed his desire to bring equilibrium to the world. Frankly, I thought of Alain Resnais throughout the film—though Christoph Huber made a cryptic reference to Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture before pointing out the finale’s similarity to Bruce Conner. My favorite thing about this film which Van Damme wrote, directed, starred in, and edited, was, aside from the occasional searing image (for instance the yellow smeared freeze frames of the titular eagle, so far the most raw image of the festival), was the Resnais-by-way-of-giallo character Van Damme plays. This psychopath lays out a mental reality, a flashback-ridden traumatic schizophrenia, over our natural reality (or perhaps the film’s straight-to-video action movie world). This forces the man to re-live and re-stage the world he sees through his insanity—continually torturing his mind—in the real, or sane world. All with notably manic, bloody, and self-destructive results, of course. Could Philip K. Dick have done any better?