An average movie

After ‘Klein Teun’, Alex van Warmerdam took his time and, 5 years later, he finally came up with a new directing effort but, unfortunately, it turned out to be his weakest movie so far, I’m afraid. At least, the DVD I watched was of much better quality than the DVDs I saw for his previous movies and it was pretty neat that half of the movie was taking place outside of the Netherlands which was a first for van Warmerdam. Unfortunately,  that was pretty much the only things I enjoyed about this movie. Eventually, what bothered me the most were the huge ellipses that they would make. For example, at some point, Maria and Jacob end up in some town and, then, completely out of the blue, they seemed to be living in some homeless tent under a bridge without any explanation whatsoever. How the hell did they end up there? Then, later on, they decide to go to Spain with their scooter and, within minutes, they end up in Spain. That was something that kept occurring throughout the whole thing and I thought it was just so lazy and annoying. On top of that, I never really cared about the story or the characters involved. In fact, I discovered afterwards that Alex van Warmerdam hated the original cut of this film and he had since completely rejected this flick. More than 15 years later, he has actually released a new director's cut and it would be interesting to check it out at some point since this theatrical version had been actually rather underwhelming. Anyway, to conclude, even though it was the most disappointing movie delivered by this director so far, I still though it was a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially, if you are interested in Alex van Warmerdam’s work.