Venus in Furs (1994)

Due to the fact that it has crossed my path countless times in my life, I recently decided it was about time that I read Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s most famous novella Venus im Pelz (1870) aka Venus in Furs, even though I am not a masochistic mensch who enjoys being whipped or generally mistreated by women in absurdly expensive fur coats. Originally a part of a rather ambitious epic six volume cycle (with each volume featuring six novellas) envisioned by the author entitled Das Vermächtnis Kains aka Legacy of Cain that was ultimately never completed (Sacher-Masoch only completed two of the six projected novellas), the work ultimately inspired psychiatrist turned sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to coin the word ‘masochism’ in tribute to the book’s perverted flagellation-fetishizing author and would go on to influence everyone from the Velvet Underground (who included a single entitled “Venus in Furs” with their debut album) to kraut carpet-muncher filmmaker Monika Treut (who directed a modernist lesbian reworking of the novella under the title Verführung: Die Grausame Frau (1985) aka Seduction: The Cruel Woman). In fact, von Sacher-Masoch’s novella has been adapted by a number of other filmmakers, including sexploitation hack Joe Marzano, slightly underrated Italian giallo maestro Massimo Dallamano, and most recently Roman Polanski, but none of these works are more faithful to the original work than a little known and considerably underrated black-and-white Dutch adaptation. Indeed, Venus in Furs (1994) aka Venus im Pelz was the stunning directorial debut of real-life lovers Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs, who are easily two of the most underrated filmmakers working in the Netherlands and have created a half dozen or so highly idiosyncratic and rather dark yet aesthetically resplendent features, including Lulu (2005), Crepuscule (2009), and Vlees (2010) aka Meat. Originally co-written by South African auteur Aryan Kaganof (whose contributions to the work were apparently mostly unused for whatever reason, though he is credited in the film under his birth name Ian Kerkhof in the film), the film is unquestionably one of the most elegant and seemingly visually immaculate and exceedingly exquisite S&M/BDSM-themed films ever made, as a work that makes being beaten and humiliated by a bitchy and superlatively shrewd woman seem almost pleasurable and ultimately makes Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) seem like a tasteless and equally soulless piece of senseless pseudo-erotic softcore swill on big budget Hollywood steroids. Aesthetically speaking, Venus in Furs is a positively penetrating piece of pure and unadulterated cinema of the rather refined risqué sort that oftentimes resembles a chiaroscuro and owes much of its absolutely entrancing majesty to German Expressionism, film noir, Dutch avant-garde auteur Frans Zwartjes (who was once Nieuwenhuijs’ teacher), and the black-and-white works of Ingmar Bergman and Mai Zetterling. In short, Seyferth and Nieuwenhuijs’ film features a sort of aberrant yet arousing aristocratic elegance and dignified decadence that is completely absent from contemporary cinema, be it European arthouse or otherwise.  Indeed, if you're looking for a cheap and sleazy masturbation aid featuring used-up sluts with silicone tits and spastic editing, Venus in Furs is surely not for you.

 Based on a cryptically autobiographical novel inspired by author von Sacher-Masoch’s experience of voluntarily making himself the the slave of a novice novelist named Fanny Pistor (who used the Slavic noble alias ‘Baroness Bogdanoff’) who carried out the writer’s fantasy to be regularly whipped by a cruel and wickedly demanding ice queen wearing nothing but a fancy fur coat, Venus in Furs depicts the doomed BDSM roleplay-based (anti)romance of an effeminate dark-haired aristocratic writer/artist and self-described ‘suprasensual man’ named Severin von Kusiemski (André Arend van Noord) who coerces his busty blonde lover Wanda von Dunajew (Anne van der Ven) into becoming his cruel master and even draws up a contract to make sure she will carry out their aberrant arrangement, which surely no sane man would ever think of, let alone obsessively desire. Told in a partly nonlinear yet seamlessly constructed fashion, Seyferth and Nieuwenhuijs’ superlatively sadomasochistic piece of intricately stylized celluloid will certainly be much more accessible to those that have read von Sacher-Masoch’s novel (in fact, I highly recommend reading the book before daring to watching the film).  Near the beginning of the film in a strangely soothing yet foreboding scene where the two lead characters are lying on the ground after sex, prospective femme fatale Wanda mentions to her beau that she wants to go on a journey, so protagonist Severin asks her if she will sign a contract that he has written to make him her slave, cuckold, personal gardener, and all-around personal bitch boy so long as she agrees to become his ‘Venus in Furs’ and regularly whip him while wearing nothing but a fur coat. Notably, as written in the source novel: “Venus in this abstract North, in this icy Christian world, has to creep into huge black furs so as not to catch cold.”   Of course, Christ's presence is totally absent from the film and Wanda ultimately becomes Severin's dark goddess in a hermetic sadomasochistic world somewhere between heaven and hell, though most viewers will certainly see it as more of the latter.

 Although Wanda is initially reluctant to go along with Severin’s warped fetish-based fantasy, she ultimately gives in and eventually comes to love the power she holds over her increasingly weak and meek (non)lover, who she soon naturally begins to lose all empathy for, as no sane woman can genuinely respect a feeble man who takes orders from a member of the fairer sex. As Wanda’s slave and servant, Severin is forced to drop his aristocratic title and take on the common servant name ‘Gregor,’ which he is proud to be called to the point where he gets rather mad when his malevolent mistress mistakenly calls him by his real noble name. As Severin explains via narration, he developed his rather idiosyncratic tendencies when he was a young man after a distant aunt of his tied him up and whipped him until he begged for her forgiveness and kissed her feet in a life-changing experience that, to quote the protagonist, made him realize, “A fierce passion was awakened in me and ever since my aunt has been the most attractive woman in the whole world.” As Severin also explains, “At the age of ten, I laid my hands on a copy of THE LEGENDS OF THE GREAT MARTYRS. I read it with a revulsion bordering on voracious ecstasy.” While a handsome nobleman, Severin has dedicated his life to drawing sadomasochistic images and he is not even very good at that, or as he describes, “I live as I paint and write. I progress no further than an intention. A plan…A first act…A first line. Such people just happen to exist…People that start all kinds of things, but never finish anything. I am someone like that…A dilettante.” Unquestionably, as his undying dedication to being debased by a devilish dame demonstrates, Severin is only truly motivated by being brutally whipped by a beauteous babe wearing a fancy fur coat. In fact, Severin is so dedicated to his contract with Wanda that he makes a mockery of his noble bearing by carrying out proletarian jobs that include serving drinks to his master and giving her baths, mopping floors, and tending to a garden, among various other dull and tedious forms of unskilled labor. While in public, Wanda walks Severin around like a dog on a leash that is hooked to his nipples.  While it seems like Severin will accept any and every form of degradation from waywardly wanton wench Wanda, the protagonist ultimately learns that every man has his limits when it comes to receiving abuse from a brutish blonde beastess.

 While Severin is so severely and unwaveringly masochistic that he allows a trio of topless negresses to hunt him down and hook him to a cart like he is a horse so that he can give them a ride, the protagonist begins to feel some real internal torture when Wanda forces him to track down a marginally handsome and masculine Greek aristocrat (Raymond Thiry) that she has become infatuated with so that she can go on a date with him. Ultimately, Severin becomes extremely angry when he realizes that Wanda is simultaneously afraid of and infatuated with the Greek, who is depicted as a Byronic hero in the novel and who gives her the sort of martial masculinity that she hopelessly craves and the protagonist completely lacks. When Severin calls Wanda out on her infatuation with the other man and she responds by stating, “I will torment you until you hate me,” the protagonist becomes so irked that he falls out of his ‘Gregor’ character, grabs his ‘master’ by the throat, and forces her to get on her knees, thus momentarily obtaining the little lady’s respect again for the first time since the two began their master-slave relationship. That night, Severin suffers a nightmare that foretells his brutal fate and pathetically complains to Wanda that, “I dreamt you betrayed me.” The next day, Wanda ties Severin to a large pillar and asks him, “Do you still love me?” to which the protagonist replies in a groveling manner, “Insanely. You’re divine.” After a period of time of leaving Severin tied to the pillar by himself, Wanda returns, though she brings two friends that include a Sapphic lover and the stoic Greek. Needless to say, Severin feels betrayed and demands that he be released as he refuses to be beaten by anyone else aside from his mistress, so his master’s lesbo lover reads the protagonist’s contract that gives Wanda the full right to do with him whatever she sees fit, including allowing him to be brutalized by a rival male. Despite begging “not him,” Wanda gives the Greek the whip and the stoic fellow subsequently begins violently beating the protagonist. After Wanda and her carpet-muncher friend drop their fur coats and walk out of the torture room completely naked, the Greek brands the protagonist in a conclusion that is more delightfully dark than von Sacher-Masoch’s novel. 

 Notably, the real-life collaborative filmmaking relationship between Venus in Furs co-directors Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs does not seem all that different from the lead characters in the film, as while the former is responsible for ‘dictating’ to the actors what to do and penning most of their scripts (aka creating the oftentimes fetishistic filmic ‘fantasies’), the latter is somewhat the ‘servant’ and certainly the laborer as the man responsible for most of the technical aspects of the work, including the cinematography (in fact, Nieuwenhuijs is responsible for shooting every single one of their films). Of course, whatever the dynamics of their romantic relationship, I think it is rather revealing that Seyferth and Nieuwenhuijs would opt to adapt von Sacher-Masoch’s novella as their first feature film, as most men would probably be too embarrassed to co-direct a film with their partner where the male protagonist is a macabre masochistic cuckold who is violently whipped and branded by his lover's new ultra-masculine male fuck-buddy. In terms of its pleasantly preternatural structure, refreshing faithfulness to its source material, consistently oneiric essence, and erotic yet dark and forlorn aesthetic prowess, Venus in Furs is quite arguably Seyferth and Nieuwenhuijs’ most immaculate work to date. It should also be noted that the film is faithful to the message of von Sacher-Masoch’s source novel in regard to the perennial war between the sexes as reflected in protagonist Severin’s words, “That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man's enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work.”  Of course, history has proven that von Sacher-Masoch was wrong in regard to his belief that both sexes can become companions when women are “equal in education and work,” as modern career-obsessed Occidental woman more or less acts as if she no longer needs man and even resents him, hence the increasing proliferation of S&M/BDSM and cuckold porn.  Undoubtedly, it was to my great surprise that the novel features almost Weininger-esque criticisms of the fairer sex like “Woman’s character is characterlessness,” which are mostly expressed in a subtle and somewhat esoteric visual fashion in the film. As someone that finds cuckolds to be the height of emasculation and spiritual castration, I certainly could not relate to the pathetic figure of Severin, yet Venus in Furs ultimately proved to be an exquisitely erotic celluloid experience that brings a sort of moribund and decaying spirit to classical Occidental pulchritude, as a work that seems like it was directed by the sadomasochistic deathrock-obsessed bastard brood of Teutonic sculptor Arno Breker and true cinematic avant-gardist Frans Zwartjes.

-Ty E

Evenings (1989)

If the Netherlands has anything representing a sort of Dutch equivalent to J.D. Salinger’s obnoxiously overrated novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), it is probably De avonden (1947) aka The Evenings by Gerard Reve, which is so popular in its native land that it was ranked first among works created since 1900 in the Dutch homeland in a 2002 poll conducted by members of the Society for Dutch Literature. Written by a subversive sodomite of the almost pathologically anti-communist sort who was brought in to the atheistic Marxist faith by his parents but later converted to Roman Catholicism and who claimed to use homosexuality as merely a motif for his work which ultimately dealt with the theme of the inferiority of human love in comparison to ‘divine love,’ The Evenings is certainly a more intricate, mature, and multilayered work in comparison to Salinger’s oftentimes intolerably whiny proto-hipster novel. In fact, the novel was deemed so bizarre due to its largely plotless and sometimes dreamlike structure that it was believed that it could never be adapted into a film, yet Dutch auteur Rudolf van den Berg (De Johnsons aka The Johnsons, Süskind) had the gall to take up the challenge, or as he later reflected regarding his decision to adapt the novel: “EVENINGS (DE AVONDEN) is the best known Dutch literary novel of all time, so turning it into a film was a great challenge. Everybody agreed it couldn't be done, so I ignored all advice, and told the story backwards compared to the book. I remember feeling that through each and every shot the story began to reveal to me something about myself until eventually, when the film was finished, I finally understood what the film was about.” While van den Berg’s 1989 film adaption of the same name was criticized by certain film critics because they felt it was not a faithful adaptation, the film became somewhat of a cult hit in the Netherlands and managed to earn no less than two Golden Calfs (the Dutch equivalent to the Oscars), including ‘best film’ and ‘best actor,’ thus demonstrating its importance in the context of Dutch cinema history.

 The darkly comedic story of a hyper-neurotic 23-year-old college dropout turned office worker who is terrified of confronting the year 1948 as he is of embracing his latent homosexuality, Evenings is, not unlike the films of German auteur Volker Schlöndorff, a slightly dumbed down and stripped take on its source material that ultimately attempts to capture the spirit of Reve's work while paying biographical tribute to the writer himself (as reflected in the film's gay angle), but of course the director also hoped to add his own angle as reflected in an almost ghostly Jewish presence throughout the flick (while the film features no Jewish characters, a closed Jewish shop is featured throughout, as if to subtly symbolize the eradication of the fairly ancient and once thriving Dutch Jewish community during the Second World War). Indeed, not surprisingly considering van den Berg’s Judaic background, the film takes a Freudian-cum-Kafkaesque approach to Reve’s work as it wallows in strikingly surreal and oftentimes dark symbolic psycho-sexual imagery, especially of the Oedipal sort, including big breasts dripping with milk, and certainly does not really emphasize the Roman Catholic subtext like Paul Verhoeven’s somewhat superior Gerard Reve adaptation De vierde man (1983) aka The Fourth Man, which also stars Thom Hoffman. Unquestionably, van den Berg’s film owes a great deal of its peculiar potency to lead Hoffman who, as a man who starred in such great and eclectic films as Theo van Gogh’s daringly iconoclastic debut feature Luger (1982), Adriaan Ditvoorst’s Dutch magical realist magnum opus De Witte Waan (1984) aka White Madness, and Aryan Kaganof’s darkly humorously pornographic cinematic poem Shabondama Elegy (1999) aka Tokyo Elegy, is arguably the greatest and certainly the most daring Dutch actor of his generation. Simultaneously depicting the literally and figuratively nightmarish neuroticism of a young crypto-cocksucker suffering from an acute case of oikophobia who must come to terms with his desire to suck cock despite living with horrifically humdrum parents with whom he takes great pains to relate, as well as portraying post-WWII Holland from the perspective of a Jew who seems to have mixed feelings regarding the Dutch role in the war, Evenings is ultimately a work that straddles an aesthetically schizophrenic line between the forlorn and farcical as well as the hyperrealist and absurd, thus making for an undeniably unforgettable, if not somewhat uneven, coming-of-age work that makes it seem like the Dutch psyche was a hidden casualty of the Second World War.

 23-year-old college dropout turned office worker Frits van Etgers (Thom Hoffman) is going to have one hell of a struggle trying to deal with Christmas and the days after that leading up to New Year’s Eve of 1947, which he seems to believe will conclude with some sort of apocalypse that seems to be more metaphysical than literal. Frits lives by the personal mantra, “Things are bad. Otherwise I'm fine,” and he seems completely incapable of relating to anyone, especially his hopelessly banal and old-fashioned communist parents, who have no idea what to do with their seemingly perennially problematic prodigal son. With his father (Rijk de Gooyer) being a half-deaf hard ass who asks his son rather rude things like, “Don’t you ever doubt your sanity?” and his mother (Viviane de Muynck) being an easily upset worrywart who likes calling her son ‘mouse,’ Frits is on the verge of insanity as a result of living with his parents and incessantly fantasizes about them dying in grisly ways. At the very beginning of the film, Frits suffers from a tormenting nightmare set 11 minutes before the New Year where he spots a fellow closeted homosexual named Wim (Jobst Schnibbe) outside from his upstairs window and subsequently runs to his parents to tell them something that he just cannot find the words to say. Of course, what Frits cannot tell his parents is that he has the unshakeable urge to smoke some pole and to pound some twinks. 

 Partly because he has an immaculate head of red hair that he prides himself on, but mainly because he is hopelessly neurotic and suffers from a variety of pathologies, Frits is obsessed with balding and wastes no time telling people, including his much hated family man brother Joop (Kees Hulst), that they are suffering from a receding hairline. When Frits attends a Christmas event at his high school, he informs a former teacher while urinating next to him, “Mr. Wening, some bald people are quite happy,” in what can be described as the protagonist’s warped attempt at complimenting another person. At the same event, Frits imagines himself one day becoming as famous as Dante, Shakespeare, and Einstein, among others. While Frits is certainly a preternaturally intelligent guy with somewhat cultivated taste, he is also a hopeless slacker who has yet to attempt to fulfill his dream of being a famous writer by actually writing something. Instead, Frits likes unloading his curious and oftentimes appalling criticisms, fantasies, and desires on his oddball friends and apathetic family members. For example, Frits tells his four-eyed comrade Viktor (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) that, regarding his father, “My only hope is that he hangs himself.” Indeed, an intolerably anally retentive chap, Frits cannot stomach the fact that his half-dead papa constantly farts, mashes his food, and uses a sugar spoon for a porridge pot. Sexually speaking, Frits is all screwed up as demonstrated by the fact that he puts his penis between his thighs to make it seem as if he is a girl with a bushy beaver and then proceeds to examine his rectum with a mirror while repeatedly asking himself, “What am I? A cone or a funnel?” as if to question whether he is a man or a woman. While carefully inspecting his anus, Frits states to himself in a rather intrigued fashion regarding his toxic-waste-dispensing nether-region, “Disgusting. If you saw a photo of it…you’d never believe it was human.” As demonstrated by the fact that he abruptly blows off his virtual doppelganger Wim—a fellow closet case that has the same exact haircut and some of the same neurotic tendencies as the protagonist—after the young man gets a little too ‘personal’ with him, Frits is deathly afraid of his hidden sexuality. 

 One night, Frits decides to pay a visit to his quirky offbeat female photographer friend Bep (Elja Pelgrom) and on a whim he decides to bury his head into the little lady’s crotch and then proceeds to pull up her dress. While Bep initially becomes angry and pushes his hand off of her, she subsequently puts Frits’ hand on her naughty bits, which startles the protagonist and causes him to immediately abort the rather awkward sexual encounter. Possibly because she thinks he is a gynophobic nancy boy and thus feels sorry for him, Bep gives Frits a stuffed rabbit to borrow, which becomes a sort of symbol of his repressed sexuality and which he punishes by anally pillaging it with a stick. If there is anyone else like Frits in his town, it is his demented one-eyed friend Maurits Duivenis (Pierre Bokma), who fantasizes about strangling little boys in the woods and also shows signs of being a repressed rectum-reamer, albeit of the more sadomasochistic sort. Despite the fact that Frits states to Maurits, “I’m polite but that is partly fear. With you, I’m never sure I won’t get stabbed in a dark alley,” the two certainly have a special connection due to being sexually perverted social outcasts. Needless to say, Frits suffers from a histrionic freakout and flees when Maurits attempts to grab his cock while describing in a fetishistic manner how he would torture a young boy. Unquestionably, Frits receives a sort of epiphany regarding his life when he discovers that his beloved closest crush Wim has committed suicide and although he never says it outright, the protagonist knows that he must embrace his homosexuality if he ever wants to live anything resembling a tolerable life. While Frits becomes obsessed with the idea of coming out to his parents on New Year’s Eve night, he ultimately wusses out, runs outside into the street, and suffers a hellish allegorical hallucination where he sees a group of menacing demonic figures in masks standing among otherworldly flames that the protagonist’s dead friend Wim soon walks by. In the end, Frits finds it in himself to find forgiveness for his unsympathetic parents and declares to himself before going to bed regarding surviving the New Year, “It's all over, gone. But I’m alive. I breathe, therefore I’m alive. Whatever ordeals…pain, disasters…I’m alive.” After falling asleep, Frits dreams about his smiling parents collectively telling him, “Frits, it has been seen. Yes, son. It has not gone unnoticed,” as if they are letting him know that they realize he is gay and accept it. In a metacinematic scene in tribute to source writer Gerard Reve, who seemed to use writing as a source of solace and therapeutic outlet for his neurotic tendencies like so many writers, the film concludes with Frits beginning to write for the first time in the film in a heavy-handedly triumphant scene complimented by uplifting transcendental music. 

 While I would have surely appreciated it if director Rudolf van den Berg had chosen to emphasize Gerard Reve’s innate anticommunist and Roman Catholic tendencies in his adaptation of Evenings, the film certainly exceeded any expectations I had for the work, though I think that is largely owed to Thom Hoffman’s singular performance in what was surely an intricate and undeniably unflattering role. Aside from van den Berg’s predictable Freudian approach to the source novel, the film has an all-too-polished Hollywood-like aesthetic that can be somewhat distracting and even annoying, especially considering the overall subversive essence of the novel, which would have certainly been better adapted by an indigenous Dutchman like Adriaan Ditvoorst who demonstrated a proficiency for adapting the works of Willem Frederik Hermans (who, with Reve and Hebrew Harry Mulisch, is considered one of the ‘Great Three’ of post-WWII Dutch literature). Indeed, like the works of fellow Dutch Judaic George Sluizer (Spoorloos aka The Vanishing, Dark Blood), van den Berg’s film has a certain deracinated ‘cosmopolitan’ feel about it that, for better or worse, betrays the decided Dutchness of its source material, thus probably making it more accessible for foreign viewers. Undoubtedly, Evenings is worth seeing just for Hoffman’s performance alone as a cracked crypto-homo trichophile that ultimately makes Holden Caulfield seem like an insufferable failed bourgeois man-child who needs to shut-up and just get laid. Of course, antihero Frits of van den Berg’s film also needs to get laid, but being a confused cocksucker in pre-sexual liberation Calvinist Holland ultimately makes for a more interesting scenario than a rich American wuss who is too afraid to lose his virginity, even after paying a pussy-peddler for her valuable time. Judging by van den Berg’s subsequent work De Johnsons (1992) aka The Johnsons—a strange and somewhat original yet mostly mediocre horror flick starring Dutch diva Monique van de Ven of Turkish Delight (1973) fame that is notable for apparently being the last Dutch horror film of the twentieth century, but not much else—Evenings certainly seems to owe most of its potency to Reve’s novel as channeled through the wayward spirit of Herr Hoffman.  Of course, the film is just as much a (anti)tribute to and psycho-biography of Gerard Reve as it is an adaptation of the writer's novel, which is ultimately what makes it quite intriguing and fairly original for a work of its kind.

-Ty E

Charlotte for Ever

To his credit, Viennese Jewish actor and director Fritz Kortner was so angered by Uncle Adolf and his gang making him flee Germany that when he returned to the Fatherland in 1949, he exploited his glaring Jewishness on stage, intentionally acting as an obscenely sinister Shylock in a 1960s production of The Merchant of Venice, even stating of his respect for the fictional anti-Semite-inciting Hebraic Venetian moneylender, “he stands up and he is a terrifying Jew, and that’s why I play him. He does not whine for mercy…I am an unintimidated Jew… I have found out that you succeed with this perspective rather than trying to sneak in.” While Kortner’s antics were surely subversive in terms of overtly agitating the very same people that considered him a member of a hostile enemy group only a couple decades before, they pale in comparison to the way degenerate French Judaic singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg routinely exploited the more unsavory stereotypes of his seemingly forsaken tribe throughout his entire highly obnoxious and proudly obscene career. Apparently, Gainsbourg was deeply affected as a child by having to see his fellow Jews wear yellow stars as a result of the German occupation of France during the Second World War and his work certainly reflected this as especially demonstrated by his 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker, which is completely dedicated to National Socialist themes and features song titles like “Nazi Rock,” “Yellow Star,” and “S.S. in Uruguay,” yet the singer more oftentimes used more ‘cryptic’ approaches to attacking and morally degrading the ostensibly antisemitic goyim. Certainly, both in physical appearance and behavior, Gainsbourg put the Jewish caricatures featured in Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher’s tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer to abject shame and it is certainly no small coincidence of history that he produced a bastard brood with the grandniece of German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus of the Battle of Stalingrad, which is oftentimes considered the event that sealed the tragic fate of the Occident. 

 Indeed, from turning innocent blonde beauty Francis Gall into a sucker by getting her to record the song “Les Lucettes” aka “Lollipops”, which the yé-yé singer thought was about suckers but was really about sucking cock, to recording the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” in a reggae style to infuriate right-wingers and nationalist veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, Gainsbourg thrived on being a culture-distorting kosher creep who deracinated French kultur by Americanizing music and giving it a perversely pornographic tone, but arguably his most radically repugnant publicity stunt was recording an incestuous duet with his then-12-year-old daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg entitled “Lemon Incest” in 1984. Aside from the song evolving into an equally degenerate music video featuring the father and daughter in bed together in their underwear, Gainsbourg also directed a largely forgotten film entitled Charlotte for Ever (1986), which features, among other things, his then underage teenage daughter Charlotte topless, as well as engaged in would-be-lurid lesbo love, which her unhinged incestuous father watches up close in complete amazement. Charlotte for Ever is more or less a pathetically preposterous artsy fartsy chamber piece featuring Hebraic homeboy Gainsbourg as a widowed weirdo writer of the desperate dipsomaniac sort that lurks around his home with a Michael Jackson-esque leather glove and lusts over his daughter and her schoolgirl pals when he is not begging for money and berating his long suffering buddies. Surely seeming like a cheap and tasteless gimmick compared to the singer turned filmmaker’s surprisingly decent directorial debut Je t'aime moi non plus (1976) aka I Love You, I Don’t starring Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro as a ‘bisexual’ Polack garbage truck driver and Jane Birkin as a tomboyish waitress with a dyke cut, Charlotte for Ever is ultimately a reminder that the only reason Charlotte Gainsbourg is a screen sex icon is because she is the progeny of a world famous pernicious pervert who taught her at an early age to sexually degrade herself on film and not because she is even remotely attractive, not even as a little Lolita (of course, Gainsbourg makes the carelessly cliched mistake of namedropping Nabokov’s obscenely overrated novel). 

 Stan (Serge Gainsbourg) the swarthy little man is a washed up screenwriter who apparently paid his dues in Hollywood and now spends most of his time getting drunk, lusting over and denigrating his daughter Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and feeling up her middle school comrades, talking trash to and scamming money out of his friends, and having sex with morbidly obese prostitutes that would probably suffocate him if they sat on his rather repulsive rat-like face. Ever since he killed his wife in a car wreck where he collided with a large truck, Stan has been immersed in a personal hell that neither whisky nor his daughter’s itty bitty preteen titties can save him from, or so it seems. At the beginning of the film, Stan begs his bud Herman (Roland Dubillard) for a $10,000 advance because he is broke even though the screenwriter has already been given an advance and instead of producing a script, he was only able to finish “three lousy pages.” When Charlotte gets home from middle school, literally and figuratively dirty old men Stan and Herman take turns hitting on her and she eventually flips out and cries, “I want my mom. I want to see my mom.” Naturally, poor Charlotte blames her incestuous pedophile father for her belated mommy’s tragic death. 

 As one can expect from a pretentious screenwriter of the daughter-lusting sort, Stan likes quoting Nabokov’s Lolita, which Charlotte has read because she proudly stole a copy of the book from her school library. After Charlotte blames her father for her mother’s death, Stan slaps her in the face and then reveals in a melodramatic fashion that he wears a leather glove because, as he states, “I tried to drag mom out of a pile of metal and burned my hand.” Of course, the viewer suspects he wears the glove because he is a pretentious prick who wants to give off the image that he is a perverted sadist of the ultra chichi sort. When Charlotte and her nerdy school friend Therese (Sabeline Campo) decide to play bowling in the house by using wine bottles as pins in a game where the loser must show the winner her pussy, Stan gets mad after finding broken glass on the floor and punishes his daughter’s friend by making her cleanup and subsequently opening up her shirt and feeling her small breasts. When his daughter’s friends are not around to manhandle, Stan has a morbidly obese prostitute who is so fat that she waddles come over so that he can revel in the malodorous pheromones of her smelly rotten lard cunt. Although a predatory heterosexual, Stan is friends with a fat old queen named Leon (Roland Bertin) who is suicidal because his hustler boy toy has broken up with him. Needless to say, when Stan remarks to Leon regarding his boyfriend, “Your Stephen is an asshole…And he doesn’t like guys, it’s obvious” and “He used his ass to pay the dealer,” he has a little queer bitch fit and asks his friend if he has any humanity. After crying about his parents, wife, and dog being dead, Stan the untermensch then cries, “And any day now Charlotte will have a kid or bring a guy home…some worker, black or Asian, it’ll be just great,” thus revealing that he is against miscegenation, even though his progeny is the product of such an unnatural union. Meanwhile, Charlotte physically assaults and rips off the bra of her friend Adelaide (Anne Le Guernec) because she is jealous her pal has been getting banged by her father. Needless to say, Stan gets a kick out of seeing his daughter on top of a topless young girl that he has been banging and gets closer to the young ladies to get a better look. 

 Near the end of Charlotte for Ever, Gainsbourg allows his daughter to put a handgun to his head, but unfortunately she does not pull the trigger. Notably, the very end of the film features father and daughter lying in bed together, with the former stating to the latter, “You’re a little shit” in a scene that seems to express Gainsbourg’s frustration with wanting to defile his daughter but not being able to bring himself to go all the way (although he confesses to groping her breasts while drunk). Indeed, in terms up delighting in defiling innocent little dames of the underage sort, Gainsbourg only transcends fellow Hebraic holocaust survivor Roman Polanski, but unlike the Rosemary’s Baby director, the Judaic frog songwriter seems to take great pride in his pathological perversion. Not surprisingly, Charlotte Gainsbourg continued playing in relative-directed incest-themed films as she later starred in her British uncle Andrew Birkin’s Ian McEwan adaptation The Cement Garden (1993). Of course, Lars von Trier would later provide Charlotte with the cinematic surrogate father she needed after cinematically exploiting her in works like Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2013).  Of course, only someone as uniquely unsavory as Serge Gainsbourg could ever think a swarthy sub-homely horse-faced lady like Charlotte would ever make for a stunning sex symbol of the silver screen. Undoubtedly, what makes Charlotte for Ever interesting is that the film demonstrates that the eponymous pseudo-diva has always seemed like a dark, damaged, and depraved gawky gal who probably has the talent to turn rampant heterosexuals into gynophobic queens, but I guess one should not expect anything less from the mongrel progeny of a monster like Monsieur Gainsbourg.  Of course, directed by Gainsbourg or not, Charlotte for Ever is unequivocally the sort of preposterously pretentious and pathologically plodding film that gives arthouse films, especially of the French persuasion, a bad name.

-Ty E

Winter in Wartime

When Dutch arthouse auteur turned Hollywood blockbuster filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Robocop) returned to the Netherlands to make his first Dutch film in over two decades, Zwartboek (2006) aka Black Book starring Nordic blonde beauty Carice van Houten with a bad dye job in the patently absurd role of a Jewess in the Dutch resistance who infiltrates the SS SD and seduces a Hauptsturmführer, I was terribly disappointed as it demonstrated the aesthetically and socio-politically deleterious effect that his twenty years in Tinseltown had had on his film making. Indeed, Verhoeven is responsible for directing one of the greatest and most critically revered Dutch war films ever made, Soldaat van Oranje (1977) aka Soldier of Orange, which featured none of the absolutely odious Zionist-pandering or soullessly sleek film making that plagued the obscenely overrated Black Book. Despite the fact that he has yet to make it to Hollywood, relatively young and popular Dutch auteur Martin Koolhoven (De grot aka The Cave, Het zuiden aka South) has already demonstrated that he has been poisoned by the conspicuously clichéd, contrived, and sentimental Spielberg brand of WWII filmmaking with his most recent work Winter in Wartime (2008) aka Oorlogswinter based on the popular best-selling 1972 novel of the same name by Dutch politician and scientist Jan Terlouw. The story of a 14-year-old Dutch boy who gets involved with the resistance after finding an injured British RAF airman in the woods and naively sees it as a sort of heroic adventure to help the Brit avoid being captured by the Germans, source writer Terlouw, who was 8-years-old during the German occupation of the Netherlands, said his intent with the novel was, “to make it clear to readers that they shouldn't think, after finishing the book, that the war had somehow been a glorious period; the second was to provide—in a moderate manner—a human face for the Germans...,” yet the Teutonic invaders hardly have a human face in Koolhoven’s film, which depicts the Huns as boorish automatons who are just too plain dumb and slavishly subservient to notice the evilness of their atrocious actions. Strategically utilizing some of the ugliest untermensch-esque actors they could find to play Germans (e.g. Dan van Husen) and shot from the perspective of a 14-year-old that looks and acts more like a 10-year-old who thinks girls have cooties, especially when considering the time period in which the film takes place, Winter in Wartime features an extravagantly stylized cardboard tale of morality that attempts to disguise its dichotomous grade school level view of good and evil with pseudo-poetic melodramatic slow-motion scenes that beg for profoundness but scream of accidental kitsch and vulgar asininity. Indeed, the film is like the Dutch equivalent of Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) minus the Soviet propaganda and as made for Hollywood-lobotomized toddlers and American tourists. A work that barely scratches the surface of what the Dutch really suffered during the end of the Second World War, Winter in Wartime might as well have been directed by any Hollywood hack as one could probably learn just as much about the Dutch wartime experience had a proud protege of Michael Bay assembled the film. Curiously set during the end of WWII in the winter time yet making no reference to the ‘Hongerwinter’ famine of 1944-1945 in which as many as 22,000 Dutch people starved to death and could not be buried because the ground was frozen solid, Koolhoven’s film ultimately makes the war seem like a minor annoyance that caused a couple mischievous people some slight discomfort when in reality it devastated the entire country, destroyed what was left of the Dutch empire, and arguably irreparably destroyed the spirit of the Dutch people.  Indeed, the Netherlands did not go from being best known by foreigners for windmills and wooden clogs to legal weed and hookers for nothing.

 Michiel van Beusekom (Martijn Lakemeier) is a slightly rebellious 14-year-old Dutch boy who thinks his father Johan (Raymond Thiry) is a pansy pushover because he is the mayor of his town yet is keeping the peace with the dastardly German occupiers, who have been arresting and killing members of the shadowy resistance. Michiel practically worships his uncle Ben (Yorick van Wageningen) even though he is a deadbeat because he is apparently a member of the resistance and is fighting the Germans in his own personal way, or so the terribly naive protagonist believes. It is obvious that Ben is a loser as he constantly hangs out with his nephew as though they were brothers, despite being a middle-aged man, while his brother is a successful family man and respected mayor of an entire town. When Michiel’s friend Dirk (Mees Peijnenburg), a member of the resistance, gives him a message just before he is arrested to give to a blacksmith named Bertus van Gelder (Tygo Gernandt) who is ultimately killed by a kraut, the protagonist decides to read the letter and ultimately finds the coordinates to the wooded hideout of a British airman named Jack (played by less than masculine Twilight star Jamie Campbell Bower) whose plane crash landed in the Netherlands. Despite the fact that Jack is kind of an arrogant and seemingly ungrateful scrawny little twat who seems to have no qualms about putting a underage kid's life in great danger, Michiel fetishizes the resistance so much that he is more than happy to risk his young life and get the Brit to the nearby town of Zwolle, but a problem arises when the airmen is unable to walk due to an infected leg injury, so the protagonist gets his somewhat Jewish-looking nurse sister Erica (Melody Zoë Klaver) to help clean-up the wounds. Needless to say, Jack and Erica fall in love and Michiel becomes exceedingly jealous, but he is soon going to have more serious and potentially deadly things to worry about involving virtually everyone in the protagonist's rather sheltered bourgeois family.

 When the Germans find the corpse of one of their comrades who was killed by Jack shortly after his plane crashed in the Netherlands, Michiel’s mayor father is arrested and subsequently publicly executed with two other men as an example to the Dutch to not mess with the almighty occupier. In an unintentionally absurdist piece of Spielberg-esque agitprop, two German soldiers laugh in a stupidly sinister fashion while holding Michiel back while his father is being executed via firing squad. Of course, had the protagonist turned Jack in instead of helping him, his father would have never been killed in the first place. During Johan’s funeral a group of coldhearted Gestapo agents break into Michiel’s family home and wreck the place, including smashing the protagonist’s grieving mother’s fancy dishware. Despite the fact that Jack’s leg seemed like it was going to rot off only a couple days before, he and Michiel soon make an attempt to travel to the town of Zwolle but their plan is foiled by a unit of Germans that were hiding by a riverbed and thus they must make a great escape while the Nazis are chasing them through a forest on machine gun-blasting motorcycles. During the chase scene, Jack proves he is not only an airman, but a rare British daredevil rodeo master who makes the stupid krauts eat his dust. Unfortunately, while Michiel and Jack manage to outwit and ultimately outrun the Germans despite the fact they were in motorcycles and jeeps, the former’s beloved horse Caesar sustains a fractured leg in the process and must be euthanized but since the boyish protagonist cannot get the courage to do it himself, the RAF puts the beast to sleep. Since Jack is no longer safe in the woods, Michiel decides to bring him home where he introduces him to his uncle Ben, who agrees to help the Brit get to Zwolle using phony German documents. Shortly after Jack, Ben, and Erica leave to go to Zwolle, Michiel realizes that his uncle mentioned something about his resistance fighter friend Dirk that he could not have possibly known because he never told him about it and thus suspects his beloved Oom might be doing the incomprehensible by collaborating with the Germans. Upon inspecting Uncle Ben’s suitcase, Michiel finds Nazi documents and realizes that his uncle is not a member of the resistance but a double-agent that works for the Germans.  Indeed, because of his actions, Uncle Ben is responsible for the deaths of various neighbors and family friends. Luckily, Michiel manages to chase down the threesome just before they arrive at the bridge and pulls a gun on Uncle Ben and exposes his treachery to Jack and his sister.

 Ultimately, while Michiel guards Uncle Ben, Erica walks across the bridge while Jack absurdly climbs along underneath it as if he has superhuman strength. Demonstrating that he is a stern anticommunist who thinks that Europe will soon be taken over by the Soviets, Uncle Ben complains to Michiel, “The Russians will be here soon. Then we’ll see who’s occupier and who’s liberator.” Uncle Ben also reveals to Michiel that, due to his German connections, he managed to secure his father’s release but the mayor wanted to be a martyr and refused to allow another citizen to take his place as was the stipulation for sparing his life, thus now the protagonist can rest easy knowing that his father was not the pussy that he always thought he was. Of course, Michiel was quite wrong about Ben as well. When Ben manages to escape and Michiel soon catches him, he realizes he must kill his uncle or otherwise his sister and Jack will be shot dead. After Ben pleads, “Think about it, Michiel. I’m a bastard but I’m also your uncle. I’ve always protected you” and a unit of German soldiers appear nearby, Michiel acts if he has changed his mind about killing his uncle, but just as Ben begins to walk away from him, the protagonist symbolically shoots him in the back. Indeed, although not having the gall to euthanize his suffering horse, Michiel manages to kill his favorite uncle in cold blood. After the war has ended, everyone in the Netherlands celebrates with a huge parade and various parties, but Michiel has a malignant case of melancholia and cannot find it in himself to celebrate, so he merely sits at his dead dad’s desk as if trying in vain to take his place, though his friend Theo eventually manages to get him to crack a smile.

To my complete and utter shock, director Martin Koolhoven stated in a September 2013 interview with BelleOog, “WINTER IN WARTIME is the first film since AMNESIA where…the first idea was completely mine. I said I wanted to do this. I already said I wanted to do this before I was doing SOUTH. I said it to that producer Els Vandevorst […] that was the movie that was ‘me.’ And I had a much higher ambition on an artistic level. Funny enough, it was the big success.” Of course, anyone that knows anything about Dutch film history realizes that WWII flicks tend to be the most profitable and all around successful works in the Netherlands as Paul Rotha’s The Silent Raid (1962) aka De Overval, Verhoeven’s Soldier of Orange and Black Book, Fons Rademakers’ The Dark Room of Damocles (1963) aka Als twee druppels water and The Assault (1986) aka De aanslag, Roeland Kerbosch’s For a Lost Soldier (1992) aka Voor een verloren soldaat, and Ben Sombogaart’s Twin Sisters (2002) aka De tweeling, among various other works, clearly demonstrate, so Koolhoven should not have been too surprised that Winter in Wartime was such a big hit in the Netherlands as it seems like it was practically specially tailored to be a celluloid cash-cow that would win all the awards and make him a household name. For Koolhoven to say that Winter in Wartime is his most personal ‘auteurist’ work since his debut feature AmnesiA—a darkly comedic and oftentimes surreal work that seems to combine elements of works by Andrei Tarkovsky, Adriaan Ditvoorst, and David Lynch—seems nothing short of patently preposterous to the point of abject absurdity. Not only is the film seen from the perspective of a boy, but it is also a work that will appeal to mostly young boys as a sort of ‘teen arthouse’ flick that does for the Second World War what Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983) did for teenage rebel flicks. Additionally, the Dutch are easily one of the least sentimental, unemotional, and ‘no bullshit’ type of people in the world, so for Koolhoven to take such a superlatively sentimentalist approach to World War II is nothing short of disgraceful and totally unrepresentative of his countrymen and how the war affected them. I’m not Dutch, but my grandfather was and he was a messenger in the resistance who was shot in the head by a German soldier (the bullet only grazed his skull) and whose family hid a Jewish girl in their house, yet he never mentioned any of these things to my mother during his entire life (it was only at the end his life when my aunt coerced him into talking about his experiences during WWII that he ever revealed any of this) and sure as hell did not tell sentimental stories about his wartime escapades which, as far as I could tell, totally destroyed his entire life, hence why he immigrated to an uncultivated nation like the United States. Ultimately, Winter in Wartime is a fanciful borderline-fever-dream depiction of the Second World War from a Dutch filmmaker who, unlike Verhoeven, did not personally experience the German occupation and thus romanticizes it in a pseudo-poetic fashion that oftentimes looks ‘pretty’ and ‘elegant’ (not surprisingly, Koolhoven has described spaghetti westerns like Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968) and Sergio Martino’s A Man Called Blade (1977) as having an influence on the film), but is ultimately about as profound as an exploding cyst.  Indeed, even the obscenely overrated and sickeningly sentimental pro-pederast flick For a Lost Soldier—a film based on the autobiographical novel of the same name written by gay ballet dancer and choreographer Rudi van Dantzig, who managed to die of male breast cancer (combined with lymphoma)—features a more insightful depiction of the effects that WWII had on the Netherlands in its unintentionally allegorical depiction of a Canadian soldier in his early-20s seducing and buggering a vulnerable and highly impressionable 12-year-old Dutch boy.

-Ty E