Zomerhitte

This film should have never been made. Honestly, I must admit that before I saw it I had some serious doubts. The director is not a great actress, though she did a lot of movies in Holland, and the young woman who took the main part is a TV-personality with a constant smile on the face and not much self-criticism. The actor who played the other main part I recently saw in Bride Flight and although that film is better, he did not convince me than. To start with the the story, I have not read the novel it is based upon, but the script that underlays the film is something that might have been done with in mind kids having a birthday party on a rainy Sunday afternoon, not someone of the same age as the director who likes to watch a good movie. Something really disturbing were the overdubbed dialogues, it was most of the time spoken out loud. My regards go to the cameraman, at least he tried to make something out of it. It is a pity that the film is edited lousy, if not, some scenes were certainly more credible.

This movie is just like every other dutch movie, so if you enjoy movies such as turks fruit and de kleine blonde dood. then you might be okay with this one (even though those two have much better stories and actors) Zomerhitte starts strong enough, but even that one good scene ends up having nothing to do with the storyline. There's a lot of nudity (but me and others just could not find that girl attractive), the dialog is laughable (as we did a lot to the annoyance of other movie watchers), and some of the scenes are so completely random that this is more of an unintentional comedy than anything else (like a random scene in which an owl rips somebody's eye out...it has nothing to do with anything and is only referenced once later in a sentence saying "did you hear what happened...I was there"). the only reason I gave it a 2 is because some of the places they are at look nice...that's it. And the reason I saw it was because we went to the sneak preview (here in Holland we have a strange system regarding sneak previews, you pay less money then for a regular movie and you don't know what movie it is that you will be watching. All you know is that it's a new movie that's not yet in the theaters). My advice is to stay far away from this film, if you really want to see a good dutch movie watch temmink or zwartboek.

When Jan Wolkers, one of the best Dutch writers of Dutch literary history, was asked to write a 'boekenweekgeschenk', he wrote a beautiful story, which introduced young, novice readers to the literary world. The book had a fantastic plot, and really emphasized the power love can have. Above all, the story is told like it's a dream.

Then the movie rights were sold and the book got adapted. It's a good thing Jan Wolkers already passed away when this film was released, because I am sure this would've really disappointed him. The creators did exactly what Dutch films are notorious for: they tried to turn the book into a thriller with non stop action.

At the part where the book ends, the film continues for another 15 minutes. In these 15 minutes, the most unlikely things happen. I found it difficult to watch this film in the first place, but at the part where they started making up these unlikely things I actually turned it off, I didn't even want to watch the ending after the whole story got messed up so badly.

All I can say is that it's a pity that they adapted this book into a movie. That's one thing that should not be done to high quality literary masterpieces. The reason I rated this movie 6 stars is just because it is based on a book of Jan Wolkers. I hope that many people will read his book after (or before) watching this movie or after reading this review and that they will realise that the storyline in the book was way better than the one in the movie.