LudwA

It doesn't happy often, but I regretted this film's short running time. It only got good towards the ending! I guess they had to stick to children's movie length... Once again (as always in dutch movies) the voice-over is omnipresent. OK, it's kinda logical since the main character is a 10 year old boy who's trying to understand the world 'in words' (since he wants to become a writer) But still... Throughout the movie dialogues are only fragments in his self-created world of thinking. This hinders the movie to get some human to human interaction going, like with old depressed grandpa and the boy. The voice-over didn't bother me in the more fantasy-like segments where our main character (who lives in an surreal, beautiful and empty The Hague) gets to meet the Queen. This movie almost converted me from a republican to a monarchist. Not because of Georgina Verbaan (who plays the busty queen in a bathing suit). No, it's the addictiveness of the child's fantasy, to believe in fairy tales again, thus to believe in stuff like kings and queens. Ah! (By the way, did I mention the queen lives in a very oriental, if not Islamic kind of palace, take that Wilders!) Anyway, the queen orders for the boy to write her a novel. After many failed attempts the boy desperately sighs: 'Couldn't I just turn it into a play!' These kind of absurd jokes save the movie. There's some metaphors going on as well. The boy is trying to think of a 'first sentence' (for the book). This will get slightly complicated (and kinda wacky) but in dutch 'first sentence' is the same word for 'first desire/liking', so it might not be that weird that the boy figures out he will have to fall in love to get this book going! Just one example of the child logic meets modernism that are exactly the kinds of thing Toon Tellegen - a famous dutch writer - is known for, and guess what, this work is based on one of his books. And, of course, he makes a great cameo appearance.

I'd just finished reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, when I watched this movie, and they seemed to make a good pair. This is one of the most unusual war movies I've ever seen. There's no war/battle action at all! Even more so, the soldiers seem to have been wandering around, aimlessly, for years and years, in a desperate attempt to deal with their experiences in The Great War. Trying to make sense of the horror, by telling each other stories of the mythical Atlantis and singing songs. It's hard forgetting the pain and horrors they endured though (and that's what made me think of Salinger's depressed post war heroes). The group of soldiers traveling through endless dark-green and misty blue woods (apparently without ever reaching a village) is joined by a woman, played by Sylvie Testud, posing as a young boy, Jean d'Arc-style. For a long time it seems her secret will never be revealed, which fits the mood of the movie. The others are too lifeless (spiritless even) to notice she's a woman, even when they are dressing her wounds. Another good example of the beautiful alienation of this movie already takes place in the first scene. We see Sylvie Testud, standing on a hill close to her home, staring in the distance, hoping to see the front line of the War probably hundreds of kilometers away. (as if such a thing was possible, like a miracle). The woman receives bad news in a letter, and starts her journey, eventually meeting the soldiers, who grumblingly let her join their group (even though the woman pays a 'handy' price). The soldiers almost immediately tell her she can never really become one of them, and never does she join the group in their musical intermezzos. Yes, there are a handful of sixties influenced psych-folk songs, played by the soldiers on self-built instruments (even a piano, God knows where that came from). And why not? Everything is possible. Every time they play a new song, the mood seems to gets even sadder and more beautiful. Fine movie.