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Character, the 1997 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, is an Oedipal struggle both primal and epic with a Dickensian sweep and a dark Kafka-esque center. The film starts with a heated argument between two men, and when the elder is found dead with a knife in his chest the younger man is arrested and revealed to be his son. The story begins in flashback: the father, Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir from
Antonia's Line), is a fearless Scrooge-like moneylender who has cold-heartedly built his fortune by collecting debts and foreclosing on the poor. His son, Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huet), is the offspring of a single night's passion with his housekeeper--in an interesting twist he hounds her to marry him, and she leaves with the boy to raise him on her own. When she dies, father and son become locked in a fascinating battle: as Katadreuffe finds him calling in the law, Dreverhaven buys up his debts and attempts to drive him into bankruptcy. Katadreuffe eagerly takes up every challenge his father throws at him in a perverse show of strength and filial defiance. Adapted by first-time director Mike Van Diem from the 1938 novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk, this handsome epic is assured from the first frame, and excellent performances by Decleir (whose imposing Dreverhaven seems to tower over all by will as much as by size) and van Huet bring to life this study of two tortured psyches whose love emerges only through conflict and competition.
--Sean Axmaker
From The New Yorker
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, this grimly absorbing tale of a father and son engaged in murderous conflict has the look of a Rembrandt, full of chiaroscuro and silvery-brown hues. The film, set in Rotterdam in the twenties, brilliantly evokes a tight, confined society of burghers and the nooselike feel of their lives. Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet) is the illegitimate son of a hardworking mother (Betty Schuurman) and the despised town bailiff (Jan Decleir) she has refused to marry. Katadreuffe rises in a prestigious law firm, but everywhere he turns he comes up against the shadow of his father, who seems to have passed on to him aspects of his own driven, isolated character. A fascinatingly layered meditation on the limits of free will, the film is Kafkaesque in its sense of existential dread and Dickensian in its depiction of a society ruled by fear and stoicism. In Dutch. -Daphne Merkin
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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