A good movie

Even if her career never really took off internationally, Carice van Houten is still pretty much ruling the Dutch movie industry. Indeed, with this movie, it is already her 4th movie winning the Golden Calf of the best Dutch movie of the year (the other movies being ‘Alles is liefde’, ‘Zwartboek’ en ‘Minoes’) and she won also 4 Calves for the best Actress during her career. Anyway, how was the movie itself? For a Dutch production, it looked pretty good which was pretty nice and the story was quite intriguing, even though I always find it rather underwhelming when a story takes place in Africa but deals with white people, as if black folks were not interesting enough. On top of that, they never really managed to make Ingrid Jonker a truly compelling character. I mean, you can feel she must have been a talented troubled and fascinating woman but this movie never really sells the deal and it kept showing her only from afar, drinking a lot and being promiscuous with men. Also, the way they meet each other was quite over-dramatic, the fact that it was true or not doesn’t really matter. Still, Carice van Houten and Liam Cunningham gave some solid performances and Rutger Hauer was also pretty good even though his character was seriously limited. To conclude, I think my rating might be a little bit generous but I still liked this flick and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

7/10