Abel

Abel is a very amusing movie. It has been made with love and class. It has a very familiar odor of burned potatoes and crispy fishfingers. Life is sweet certainly when you are still within reach of your (obsessive) mother and notwithstanding the difficult relation to your strict dad. I could make this a lot longer but at this instant I just wanted to be the first person to add a comment. In short, very good movie !

Abel is a little bit absurdistic, strange and unreal. But other parts a very recognizable. The film smells like Fellini and sounds like Monty Python, but it is a very dutch product. You won't see any tulips or windmills, but when you have a dutch background you will understand most of the jokes and events. I suggest you just sit back and enjoy it. The story is amusing and the development of the characters is interesting untill the end. The art-direction, the whole atmosphere of the movie is very nice and also reminds me of Fellini. A Dutch classic.

Wonderful surreal comedy of Dutch (bad) manners, with superb playing through the entire cast of eccentrics, misfits and lunatics. Olga Zuiderhoek is excellent as the implacably doting mother Duif, obsessed with fertility and sabotaging all her husband's schemes to get their son Abel to lead a "normal" life. But the film is made by Henri Garcin as (the possibly ironically named) husband Victor, whose descent into madness is delightfully reminiscent of Herbert Lom's Inspector Dreyfus.

Only Annet Malherbe's Zus lets the side down, passive and accepting of her place on her admirers' pedestals, more cipher than Circe. Maybe her line that "all women like to be watched" seemed profound thirty years ago; not so much now.

Recently I saw "The dark room of Damocles" (1963, Fons Rademakers) after the famous novel of the same name by Willem Frederik Hermans.

My expectation was that "Abel" (1986, Alex van Warmerdam) was inspired by another famous novel of Dutch literature: "The evenings" by Gerard Reve. In this novel a 23 years old man gives a description of the petty bourgeoisie of his parents.

The opening scene of "Abel", which I must have seen beforehand and which created the expectations just described, is about a Christmas breakfast of Abel with his father and his mother. In this scene Abel is defying his father in a very sneaky way. Abel is played by director van Warmerdam himself and has, it must be said, a voice that sounds just like that of Gerard Reve.

Soon after the first scene it becomes evident however that the focus is just as much on Abel as on his parents. Abel is autistic to the highest degree and hasn't been outside the house for more than 10 years. In a scene not long after the opening he is investigated by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is evidently a caricature, but his diagnosis is not: the father is ashamed of his son and the mother is too protective.

In the course of the (absurdist) film the struggle between the father and mother about Abel is converted into a struggle beteween the mother and a girlfriend about Abel on the one hand and a struggle between Abel and his father about the girlfriend on the other hand.

"Abel" was the debutfilm of Alex van Warmerdam and it was an unexpected success. In "Abel" van Warmerdam introduced an absurdist style that remained his trade mark ever since. For me he is the Dutch David Lynch. Look at the "herring scene". A very strange combination of typical Dutch on the one way and absurdist on the other.

This movie is one of the best dutch movies of all times. Not a storyline with a hero, lots of action and beautiful women in it, but a sort of anti-hero who lives with his parents and does not know who to behave in the mature world. When you see the parents, you will understand why.

You have to understand dutch absurd humor, but I really do not know anyone who did not like the movie, most of the people I know love it, except maybe for my late grandparents. See it and you will love it! Also the fact that this Van Warmerdam's first movie, should give him all the respect he deserves.