Leef!

With Simon well over a year ago, I had high hopes for Dutch cinema. This was a great film, about genuine people dealing with all things life (and death) in a genuine way. At least it got some well-deserved recognition outside the Netherlands, although I'm not sure how the movie performed across the pond- but I guess it stirred things up quite a bit in the US because of its daring content.

Anyway, for those expecting Leef! to prolong the high standard set by Simon, prepare to be vastly disappointed. The film is incredibly pretentious in style and presentation. Why did it have to take 108 minutes of awkward dialogue and often pointless scenes to get to that point? I have no problem with it being pretentious, but not living up to it I do have a problem with. The camera-work and editing, especially in the first half, are overly artsy, sometimes hysterical and often completely unnecessary. On the contrary, it harms some of the (admittedly fine) performances in such a way that we cannot relate to the characters in any way, except for maybe Sybille, played by Anne-Wil Blankers, a great actress who is wholly out of place here. Jeroen Krabbé, always a treat, has a small part which is fine, but ruined by the horrific editing in that particular scene. A shame, I say.

The dialogue is typical Dutch theatre fare, in that it is overly pretentious and artificial, which is a major gripe I have with Dutch theatre anyway. Even though this might have worked better on stage, it's still far too stiff and and insignificant to make the audience relate to the characters on an emotional level. Why not just trim it down and get to the point? Being mundane is no sin if the delivery is good. Here we the see actors struggling with lines they themselves most likely found to be awkward, which explains the wooden acting on the whole, I guess.

Overall, what could have been a wonderful film about (family) life is a missed opportunity. This film gets lost in its own pretentiousness because of its lack of content and genuine emotional depth. Which, ultimately, to me, makes it a pointless affair.

I expected a lot from this director and the screenwriter, their previous cooperation on 'Cloaca' led to a masterpiece. This film however is a big disaster. It contains too many dramatic events spread over too many characters. Everybody in this film is totally wasted, the dialog is purely psychological jadajada and serves no function in telling a story that connects the different characters in a plot. As a viewer it is impossible to connect to one of the characters for longer than 2 minutes, their problems are merely unbelievable entertainment that just goes in with your popcorn but does not have any meaning. What also puzzles me is why they did not work with the same Director of Photography as in Cloaca, as it looked fantastic. Leef! however has a bleached out look, Using very hard light on the faces of the characters, I guess the idea was to enlarge their mental status by making them look more tormented, not very interesting to look at though.

For a movie that intends to celebrate life, this movie has the paradoxical quality that everything in it is highly artificial. As a girl suffers from a heart attack, for example, the person who is responsible for this dies in a car crash, so that his heart can be implanted by the girl - and to make it even more far-fetched: the car accident is a reminiscence of an almost-drowning-incident more than ten years earlier with the same actors (the mother Sybille saving the life of the boy, saves then in fact the life of her daughter). These forced plot lines are to be fond almost every scene.

The dialogs contain a similar paradox. The real subject of all speech is never named, yet the single sentences are perfectly clear and fit too perfect and very artificial to the things said before. This creates a sense of deepens that may do it well on stage (the scenario of Maria Goos was originally a lay) but on television it makes your stomach turn more and more as the film advances. And then I have not mentioned all drama and the sweet ending that catalyze this.

I was studying at the University of Amsterdam last year when I would pass the movie theater in Haarlemstrat(sp) and see the announcement for the film. I wanted so much to see the film especially because of Monic Hendrickx, but the film was not subtitled yet for English. Recently I found it on Amazon. It had English subtitles and it was in PAL, but since I own several PAL movies, I now own a portable DVD player that plays all regions. Alas, after a long wait, I was not disappointed. It is a celebration of life and I felt inspired by it. I hope this film is more widely recognized because it was perfect in every way. A few years back Zeus and Zo, another Dutch film, was nominated for the Academy Awards. I have nothing against Z&Z, but Leef should not be overlooked.

... in Dutch film that this film did not win any more prizes. For starter, the acting is really great, especially Peter Blok, Al. And Sterre Herstel gives us the full range of her not inconsiderable, 10 year old talent. This film is multi-layered and isn't ashamed to explore that. The director isn't afraid to be accused of pretentiousness. And rather than use the meandering story lines of past and present throughout the film, he sensed correctly that that would be a gimmick. So after half an hour the story is more linear, more present-time oriented. The whole mother-is-both-instrument-of-death-as-well-as-life might seem a feel good solution geared towards an happy end, but one can see it simply as poetic justice. Or butterfly wings. Or an underlining of the statement that we should live life to the fullest, because we control so very little in our life. Of course there's life's little irony that the director of Live! died two days before the premiere, but in the end what does that matter to the film? Nothing.