Lek

`Leak' starts with one of the best opening scenes I have seen in last few years. At first, it seems it's just another way to spend some movie tape and to add some length. But then we realize what's goin' on. And then becomes shocking. So is the whole movie: starts like some easy pop song but ends in a hardcore rhythm.

The story is about corruption in police. Two main characters, one policeman and one criminal are different, of course, but they have one thing in common: they had been good friends one time ago. So, they meet again, and the race begins. The race to survive. Who'll be the lucky one? There is a thin line that's just waiting to be crossed…

If you like American movies too much, you may be disappointed. Well, yes, there is lot of action goin' round but there are no super heroes in this movie, no dirty harrys, no almighty gunmen, no immortal avengers who enjoy their revenge more than everything. This film is not made for fun. This is a European movie, strong and realistic.

I saw this movie in an old fortress, it was 1.30 a. m. when the movie started and after one hour I wanted to go home because everything started to look too familiar. Fortunately, I didn't leave.

Eddy ( Cas Jansen) a young policeman is happily partnered with Ria (Ricky Koole). They seek advice from Family Planning in the hope that they may produce a baby in the very near future. Advice is given with surprising frankness. Eddy's job demands so much night work that interferes with his personal life and the dangerous nature of his work adds further difficulties to their relationship.

Young Eddy of short stature is referred to by his buddies as "Tom Thumb on Viagra". This amusing remark is one of the few moments of relief in this intense drama. The opening torture scene exemplifies the types of characters Eddy is forced to face in his police work.

Eddy is a likeable character and projects a genuine feeling of love and affection towards Ria. Unfortunately, a chance meeting with Jack an acquaintance of his infant years draws him into a web of underworld characters dealing in contraband drugs. They say that crime does not pay, but it seems that Jack has all the things in life that Eddy can only dream about.

The film requires a good deal of concentration because many of the bearded thugs look similar. The drama is well-paced and Jack's empty and prolonged fits of laughter are both threatening and spine-chilling.

Eddy gets to drive a fast Lamborghini Diablo fulfilling one of his boyhood dreams and a baby is delivered in a strange and unexpected way. Great stuff.

The film is based on a book about corruption in the Amsterdam police department by an ex-detective. Thus showing that reality is often more crazy than what we imagine.

It all starts innocently enough when police officer Eddy is asked to get in touch with his childhood friend Jack, who is now on the other side of the law. But everything soon spins out of control.

Director Jean van de Velde has a tight grip on the story. He is helped by a good script that manages to bring a few nice twists to a well-known formula. He also has a good cast. Especially Ton Kas as sinister gangster boss and Victor Löw as gangster with strong paternal feelings.

This is a good movie. The built-up tension is very exciting. The acting is good, especially by Victor Low. But as a Dutch person, it's also more exciting because you can really recognize the way people behave and the situations that arise. Because it all looks and sounds so familiar, you just identify with it more. It's strange because you see so many of these dangerous and scary situations being performed in English but not in Dutch. So when you see it in a familiar environment and in Dutch, it's just more creepy. But also a good movie in itself.

I live in Amsterdam, and it's interesting to read all the critical Dutch comments on this film and on Dutch Film in general. The camera-work, as usual, was OK here, but I couldn't get involved in the plot, if that's the right word for the sequence of scenes. I felt as though I was standing outside and watching the film go by. Not even the loud music and some fast editing could draw me in. Why?

I have a theory. Holland is 2-dimensional. Flat. Images anywhere are flat, as Mondriaan reminded us, but people who live in 3 dimensions build narratives, with flat images, in a 3-dimensional space or rather, in a 4-dimensional spacetime. They see images in a sort of deeper landscape, with a sense, an idea, of other things in the foreground and background – the images have depth, 'meaning', which can be organized in a complicated pattern and dynamic, a plot. The Dutch simply can't do this, and their attempts to construct stories in 3 dimensions always seem amateurish, childish. They can't build a story into which you can enter. Some people - even some Dutch people - say: 'they have no imagination'.

They make some great documentaries, and they have some good cameramen and women. But they can't do fiction, which articulates images in the play of imagination. Documentary makers, even some wayward filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven, can turn this around and make a virtue of the problem. They can build a collage of images into something like a question, or an ironical game, leaving the third dimension, the meaning or depth, radically open in ways that people living in 3 dimensions find very difficult to do, because 'normal' people are always themselves caught up in the play of meaning from the outset, unable to stand radically outside it.

I guess the best thing would be for the Flatlanders to recognize their strengths and their limitations, and stop trying to make 'normal' films like this one. But to do this would require a lot of imagination….