God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is not a very nice deity. He is mean to his wife (Yolande Moreau) who he bullies into silence, and he will not allow Ea (Pili Groyne) his 1o-year-old daughter go out of their high rise apartment in Brussels. He spends his whole day dressed in his pajamas in his office on his computer taking sadistic delight in dreaming up new ‘laws’ to torment humanity.
Ea decides that enough is enough and like her brother before her she feels a duty to make good on all the damage that God. She hacks into his computer one day and to really annoy him leaks to the whole world ….by text….the exact date when they are due to die. Then she escapes via the clothes dryer which has a secret passage that leads to an exit out of another dryer in Laundromat in the outside world. Now all she has to find is her own set of Apostles to help her in her task. Unlike her brother Jesus who had 12 she is going to settle for just 6, but will insist that one of them being a writer so that she can record her own Testament.
Clutching 6 index cards that she stole from God’s filing cabinet Ea goes off in search of her Apostles, most of who are currently obsessed with changing their lives now that they know exactly how long they have left to live. They are all rather wonderful misfits like middle-aged Marc (Serge Lariviere) a sex maniac who has cashed in his life savings to finally get laid when he bumps into his very first summer crush, and Francois (Francois Damiens) a killer who leaves his wife and family when he falls in love with Aurelie (Laura Verlinden) after he had tried to kill. The most bizarre, and one of the most touching, stories is that of Martine (a deliciously wonderful Catherine Deneuve) a wealthy loveless housewife who with her lifespan clock ticking away throws her husband out to take up with the love of her life who happens to be a gorilla.
As Ea sets about her plan, she is pursued by her angry father who has followed her to Earth as he needs her to unlock his computer and he can continue with his reign of terror. However as Ea succeeds in her task, her Goddess mother blissfully happy that God is not there to drive her mad, accidentally manages to re-boot his computer and soon discovers that she is not only able to help Ea but re-shape the world’s humanity to her own liking.
This wonderful bizarre surrealist black comedy directed and co-written by Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael is a tad patchy but has some really inspired ridiculous moments that certainly make up for when the plot runs a little out of steam. This satire that proposes the notion that it was God’s daughter and his wife who saved the world is probably offensive to many christians who take their religion seriously, but frankly they should know that it could never ever be mistaken for the truth, as everyone knows if God lived on earth, there is no way he would have chosen Belgium first.
