En iemand anders

This film may be of modest means, but it's very sensitively made and has a poignant story. Seventeen year old Tommy, himself out as gay, accidentally finds out that his father maintains an e-mail correspondence with a male lover. This puts Tommy in a mental conflict, because he now has to decide whether he will confront his father and inform his unsuspecting mother, knowing that this would put their family-life completely upside down.

We see how Tommy struggles with this secret, tentatively trying to get some personal information from his father, but hindered by their somewhat cool father-son relationship. When he ultimately does make a decision, and things consequentily do go awry, he sees himself as the cause of the sudden rift in his parent's marriage, and he bravely takes matters in his own hand to try and mend some of the shattered mutual trust.

The pace of the movie is slow. In spite of the heavy issue, everyone in the family stays composed and polite, no one yells or shouts or hurls reproaches, and the dialogues are cautious, with many pauses and broken-off sentences. Young Pier Bonnema is a real surprise, he is excellent and totally convincing as the bewildered and brooding, yet resourceful Tommy.

My only reservation concerns the end of the movie: in spite of the father lying to his son and his wife time and again, and in fact leading an adulterous double life, it seems that he in the end got the best of both worlds - not really the moral that I hoped for.