La peau de Bax

After 'Abel', 'de Noordelingen ', 'kleine Teun', 'de jurk' and many others, this is another example of Alex' special, wonderful qay of storytelling. He has this very special way of filming in a hyper-realistic fimstyle, with an ironic sense of humor. You have to understand 'the language'. The situations are absurd, the human relations are often distorted, the humor is wry. I love it! Who needs music, when a movie is this brilliant?

I don't know if this film tried to be an absurd comedy about competing assassins or a drama about a man trying to reconnect with his daughter, but it fails at both.

Stuff just happens without logical causes or consequences. For example, Schneider learns that he's being setup. What does he do with that information? Nothing. So what's the point of him learning it?

The film is full of these kind of things which makes watching it very boring.

It also doesn't help we never learn the characters motivations for doing things. It makes the weird things they do not just weird, but incomprehensible. In a good absurd film characters may have illogical reasons, but they do have them. Without, you can't know the characters and you just go: "oh, they're doing this now, I guess."

The dialogue is just bad.

The setting is boring. The film mostly takes place in Bax' house, which is completely white, and the surrounding swamp, which people keep wading into for no reason.

One thing I liked was when Bax' daughter, Francisca, locked herself in a room and the two were talking to each other through the door. The door then became a physical barrier symbolising the emotional barrier between the characters.

It's a shame she ran off into the swamp afterwards, because I feel this film really wanted to focus on their relationship.

It would have been better if Francisca showed up unannounced to try to repair her relationship with her dad. While Bax tries to make her leave, because he knows Schneider is coming, but he can't reveal to her he's an assassin. That could have been a very tense film.

Also, the film could have upped the absurdity. If the weird happenings actually impacted the plot it could be funny. The birthday thing, for example is underutilised, just like Schneider himself, but imagine if he's in the middle of trying to kill Bax, while at the same time on the phone with his wife to decide what flavour of birthday cake he wants.

As, it is though, the film is boring and not worth watching.

Alex Van Warmerdam is a director with a very distinguishable cinematographic style. In most of his films, everything is just a little bit out of the ordinary, but it's hard to say why exactly. 'Schneider vs Bax' is no exception.

Nevertheless, I think this film is not as good as most of his other movies. This is a crime thriller about contract killers, and in such a film even Van Warmerdam needs a script that's tight and logical. Unfortunately, it is neither. There are strange, inexplicable events, the story swerves in all directions, and there is not really a lot of suspense.

You could argue that Van Warmerdam's unique, slightly bizarre style of film making compensates for these flaws. For some this might be the case, for me it wasn't. The unique Van Warmerdam chemistry of some of his other films didn't work as well in this one.

Still, there is much to enjoy. The phlegmatic way the killers behave, as if what they do is just as ordinary as baking a cake or driving a truck, is a nice feature. There is also the Dutch landscape of treeless lakes and flat marshes, with one wooden house in which much of the action takes place.

But overall, I think this film could have been a lot better with a script in which every action is functional and every person behaves logical. The acting was also a bit uneven. I liked Tom Dewispelaere as Schneider, but Van Warmerdam himself as Bax was less convincing. Maria Kraakman played a nice part as Bax's depressive daughter who seems to be a damsel in distress, but at the end enjoys pulling the trigger as much as the contract killers.

I love this film. There is no background music it's set in bright daylight. How does Warmerdam accomplish this?

This wild and dark Dutch film is not for everyone, but for those viewers who like all kinds of strange twists and surprises in their movies, this one could well be to your liking.

Tom Dewispalaere stars as Schneider, a contract killer who reluctantly takes a job on his birthday, as he's assured that the "hit" will be quick and simple, on a writer living in an isolated lakeside bungalow. Alex van Warmerdan, who also wrote and directed the film, co-stars as Bax the supposed intended victim.

However, I probably don't have to tell you that things will definitely not go according to plan, beginning with Bax's daughter Francisca (Maria Kraakman) showing up at the bungalow. From that point on, they'll be a whole series of bizarre happenings, that just get darker and darker as the movie progressed. To be aware,they'll be lots of drug usage on screen, a couple of scenes of nudity, an attempted sexual molestation, and, of course, lots of violence as you'd expect here.

All in all, if this type of black humor is done well, as I thought this one certainly was, it can be a real treat. Although some of the plot elements didn't make complete sense and I wasn't thrilled with the ending, the overall scope of the film made it really enjoyable for me.