Netherlands Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)

December 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller

NIGHTBITCH
**/****
starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy
based on the novel by Rachel Yoder
written for the screen and directed by Marielle Heller

BABYGIRL
**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde
written and directed by Halina Reijn

by Walter Chaw I’m sick of watching films about unhappy, beautiful, rich white people. You’ll forgive me. Maybe one day, I’ll regain the appetite to try to relate to the existential malaise they suffer in the face of their extraordinary privilege, their boring sex lives, their quotidian successes at the tops of various social ladders. To the winners go the spoils, as they say, but at least have the discretion to be grateful or, failing the urge to whine, the decency to be entertaining. In 2024, when the United States chose fascism on the back of a wave of populist xenophobia and white nationalism, I admired mid-life performances from Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson in mediocre but vaunted films rueing the loss of their legendary beauty in a culture that made them famous for, at least in part, their legendary beauty. Once objects of desire, they’ve come to have regrets. Me, too. I played my part in dehumanizing them in my time. It’s complicated.

SDAFF ’24: Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts + Stranger

November 29, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Norway, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

BEN AND SUZANNE: A REUNION IN 4 PARTS
***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Anastasia Olowin
written and directed by Shaun Seneviratne

STRANGER
局外⼈
**½/****
starring Jin Jing, Liguo Yuan, Baohe Xue
written and directed by Zhengfan Yang

by Walter Chaw There’s a sense of suspension in hotel rooms, a weight accrued from the parade of temporary occupants, somehow–cosmic luggage left behind. There’s possibility in hotel rooms. You can be who you want to be and someone else will clean up after you, make it seem like you were never really there, prime the pump for the next in line. There’s freedom in that, and threat, too, a practical reminder that you are temporary and once you have gone, the world will, by design, rush to fill the space you abandoned. Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts begins in a guest suite and ends in a series of hotel rooms as nebbish Ben (Sathya Sridharan) visits his girlfriend Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), who’s away on a three-month business trip in Sri Lanka. She works for a program that’s ostensibly for the development of small, women-run companies, but lately it’s devolved into the odious task of collecting loans for the bank. “I only went to the bank because of you,” says one of Suzanne’s clients as she’s asking for more time to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, and I thought of Darth Vader on Cloud City telling Lando to pray he doesn’t alter the terms of their agreement further. Suzanne’s task, already ugly, is made uglier by the fact that she’s a white woman and all of the women who trusted her are brown. This isn’t what the film is about, though in time you realize it’s at the base of what everything’s about.

SDAFF ’24: Viet and Nam

November 26, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Philippines, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Singapore, Vietnam

Trong lòng đất
****/****
starring Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng
written and directed by Trương Minh Quý

by Walter Chaw They find one another in the earth and the pitch black more by instinct, I think, than by feeling. Like animals born in the dark and orienting themselves towards heat. We are all born in the dark, guided by need and the mysterious vicissitudes of subterranean rivers and tides. Because Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a love story, it’s first about lovers meeting and then about how their identities flow into each other like mercury, in constant flux and only ever itself. When Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) are twined together, there’s a memory of wholeness they represent–a solidity their country has never really enjoyed, annexed and colonized as it has been since its inception. They are a memory of something that never was, a dream of completion. In the credits, they’re listed as “Viet/Nam,” and over the days we spend with them, they try to uproot themselves from the trauma and division of the ground that grew them. But disconnecting yourself from the place that is your history and culture is like learning to fly by lifting yourself in defiance of gravity.

Occupied City (2023)

April 26, 20242023, 2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

***/****
based on the book by Bianca Stigter
directed by Steve McQueen

Now playing in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, the filmmaker’s elliptical, 4.5-hour nonfiction adaptation of co-screenwriter and partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a speaker at a commemoration for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade looks out into the audience at the Oosterpark and asks, “How do we create room for each other?” The site of that event, disembodied narrator Melanie Hyams tells us, was the storage yard for the occupying Nazi army’s vehicle fleet in the later days of the war, with German soldiers shooting at anyone who dared to steal stockpiled wooden blocks for use in their stoves. McQueen’s project in adapting such a sprawling, non-narrative text about the city he sometimes lives in is similarly anchored in the work of making room–not just for the myriad kinds of people who have lived and died there in the past 80 years, especially during the Second World War, but for the past and present as well.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

November 26, 20212021, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott’s second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is… And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics–it’s all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of “MST3K”–although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto’s turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here’s the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino’s accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There’s a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, “I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you’d-a unnerstan!” while Aldo makes the “c’mon” expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the “you disappointed the hell out of me” kiss of death and, again, it’s… Well, it’s notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Columnist

August 17, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Netherlands

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart’s The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who’s made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There’s something about how she’s blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she’s able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she’s now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book–a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it’s setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Domino (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, Crime, Denmark, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, France, Italy, Netherlands, Thriller

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil’s Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. “All summer long he recorded his father’s telephone calls,” she writes. “On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father’s office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse.” Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience–oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself–haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he’s directed since 2012’s Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner’s throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who’s blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It’s tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that’s under 90 minutes long.

Hot Docs ’18: The End of Fear

May 5, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Netherlands

***/****
directed by Barbara Visser

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Barnett Newman’s divisive abstract painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III” becomes both a forensic site and a compelling structural absence in Dutch conceptual artist Barbara Visser’s debut feature The End of Fear. What might have been an annoyingly palatable art doc about Gerard Jan van Bladeren’s vandalism of the painting in 1986 (van Bladeren was so outraged by the work’s abrasive shock of red, dramatic asymmetry, and obstinate refusal of representationalism that he decided he had to slash it) and subsequent failed restoration becomes something more slippery and interesting care of Visser’s puckishness as not only a filmmaker but also a presence on screen, where we see her coolly hiring a hungry grad student to create a close reproduction of her own, apparently in the filmmaker’s name. Though the project suffers at times from the preciousness of its noncommittal form–spanning everything from the expected talking heads lecturing about the painting’s mixed critical reception and tabloid history to process-based interludes of Visser’s hired gun hard at work, to abstract top-down tableaux of unnamed, black-clad gallery workers mapping out the painting’s history on the jet-black floor with masking tape and archival photos–for the most part its free-roaming approach to questions of valuation, ownership, and work in contemporary art feels playful in the right way, opening up a number of avenues for discussion out of what feels like genuine curiosity.

November (2017)

February 22, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Esoterica, Estonia, Fantasy, Netherlands, Poland, Romance

***/****
starring Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik, Arvo Kukumägi, Katariina Unt
screenplay by Rainer Sarnet, based on the novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk
directed by Rainer Sarnet

by Alice Stoehr A propeller-shaped demon drags a cow into the sky. An elder bargains with the plague, which is incarnate as a large and ornery pig. A lovesick girl changes into a wolf and back again. Such is the occult world of November. Adapted from Andrus Kivirähk’s Rehepapp, a blockbuster novel published in 2000, Rainer Sarnet’s film takes place a century or two ago, in an Estonian village where the boundary between life and death is porous. A procession of ghosts files through the woods at night. The raucous devil, his voice echoing, arises at a crossroads to barter for blood. Dirt-smudged townsfolk heed their every superstition, even when it means donning trousers on their torsos. The episodic narrative meanders through these folkloric scenarios, expanding its impressions of rustic life across a single late-autumn month. Insofar as the film tells any overarching story, it’s that of a love triangle between Liina (Rea Lest), the sometime-werewolf, unwillingly betrothed to a friend of her father; intense local boy Hans (Jörgen Liik), all scruff and tousled hair; and the young baroness Hans moons over as she sleepwalks through a manor house. The three of them have their hearts vexed and hexed over the course of November. Imagery takes precedence over plotting, though, and the latter often gives way to cryptic allegory. The film returns now and again to elemental motifs: barren trees, ripples in a river, a damp and leaf-strewn forest floor. It’s an environment where civilization holds little sway.

Dunkirk (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

December 19, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, DVD, France, Netherlands, UK, War

*½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Dunkirk (2017)

July 21, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, France, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) – VOD

February 16, 20172015, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr “You cannot fight,” explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. “Your only chance of survival comes from compliance.” This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron’s prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor’s gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion’s share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film’s greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast–Matt Barber, as Alison’s husband Tom–has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, “Did you touch my wife?” and, “I can’t have anyone else inside you.”

Love & Friendship (2016)

May 27, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenweil, Chloë Sevigny
based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
written & directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda When Whit Stillman emerged from his thirteen-year sojourn in the wilderness after The Last Days of Disco, it was with the pastel-washed curio Damsels in Distress, practically a radio transmission from a planet of the auteur’s own construction. Where his Metropolitan and Barcelona dropped anchor in immaculately-observed social environs (Manhattan’s waning debutante scene and the European refuge of loquacious Americans, respectively), Stillman’s modestly-budgeted return to filmmaking holed up in a dreamlike and not especially convincing college setting, where Gatsby-esque self-inventors sought to transform their ugly little world through good soap and new dance crazes. A deeply hermetic work even by Stillman’s standards, Damsels in Distress feels in retrospect like a minor but necessary stepping stone back to the better realized but still heightened reality of Love & Friendship, a signature work that is nevertheless Stillman’s most accessible to the uninitiated. Despite marking his first adaptation–of Lady Susan, a short, posthumously-published epistolary novel by Jane Austen, whom he has long worshipped–the film is as pure an expression of the Stillman style and worldview as any despite its largely English cast and the sincerity of its period trappings as a 1790s costume comedy about the machinations of the rich, the formerly rich, and the rich-adjacent.

TIFF ’15: Full Contact

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Croatia, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi
written and directed by David Verbeek

by Walter Chaw Brilliant if often a bit too on-the-nose, Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek's Full Contact takes on the state of modern man by detailing America's drone war. I heard a thing on NPR a while back talking about how the traditional metric of tracking a battle group's efficiency by tallying its loss-to-kill ratio has been blown of late by drone groups that have thousands of kills to zero losses. It's an existentially frightening situation in which Nintendo skills not only predict military success, but also potentially engender the same sort of desensitization regarding the tactile obscenity of murder. The movie's title is a clue to its intentions, then: Verbeek follows drone captain Ivan (Grégoire Colin), sequestered away in a bunker somewhere in Nevada where he pilots drone aircraft, bristling with munitions, into somewhere in the Middle East, the better to assassinate tagged targets. He communicates via live messaging and a headset (the way a kid on an Xbox 360 might, essentially), and one day, though he suspects better, he hits a target that turns out to be a school. Outside, he befriends a stripper, Cindy (Lizzie Brocheré), telling her he's impotent although he's not.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 23, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn’t reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn’t, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film’s deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by “good,” I mean “lurid”) true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

TIFF ’14: The Look of Silence

September 7, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, TIFF, UK

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn’t offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the “communist” purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn’t immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)–though “killed” somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli’s castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer’s footage of the murderers describing his brother’s death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two “actors” who appeared in that film, underscoring that a desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

SDFF ’13: Borgman

November 26, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft's lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture's awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there's a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

SDFF ’13: Tricked

November 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

Steekspel
*/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him to new heights as a filmmaker. As is always the case with Verhoeven, it's very likely that this whole project is some elaborate satire of exactly how stupid we are. His RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Showgirls have each enjoyed long, healthy second lives as critical darlings; in his way, he's the Douglas Sirk of the late-'80s/early-'90s: dismissed in the moment, but appreciated through the perspective afforded by time. I'm a fan. Enough so that I want to believe the prototypical mad-director persona Verhoeven inhabits in this thing is a piss on self-important meta stuff like The Five Obstructions. (Honestly, just the jaunty "fuck you" score suggests that Verhoeven is fully aware of the game he's playing here.) As for the short film that occupies the latter 50 minutes or so, it's a tale of corporate intrigue featuring unknown but game actors, playing out a sexual blackmail that feels more the lark for the context provided by the attendant documentary. Indeed, it's impossible to see the two halves as independent entities, however unintentionally, and as such, the product of the experiment lands as Verhoeven's most conventional film…ever. It's an example of the fallibility of giving people what they think they want and indulging what they think they understand. That doesn't make it better, though it does suddenly make it make sense.

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

May 4, 20122012, Argentina, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Netherlands

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.