Joy Reviews

Since I have been living in the Netherlands, I have always been interested in Dutch movies and since this movie won the Golden Calf of the best Dutch movie of the year, I was really eager to check it out. Well, to be honest, I thought it was rather disappointing. Basically, like many Golden Calf winners, I actually wondered why they picked up this movie. I mean, even though a few of those winners were really outstanding (‘Zwartboek’, ‘Paradise Now’, ‘Simon’, ‘De Tweeling’,…), many of them are just some terribly boring family features or some really obscure flicks that almost nobody has seen. This movie falls in the last category. I read somewhere on the internet that someone compared the directing to the Dardennes brother style and I thought it was indeed pretty accurate. The acting was also pretty good but, still, I didn’t really like this movie. I mean, it was just so terribly boring… Like the Dardennes brothers, they used an intimate and natural approach to the directing, shooting the characters very closely, almost right in their face but the big difference with the Dardennes work, is that the characters were really not interesting, especially the secondary characters. In this case, since I didn’t care about the story and the characters involved, it was really hard to get into this flick. Still, even though it is a really tedious watch, it remains a well made movie and I think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Dutch movie.