Wandering man seeks muse

Many of the films presented at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht this year are about men searching for something. About passive dreamers who hope for deliverance, preferably in the shape of a young woman. He knows, but that’s the way it is. The new man, like the old, needs a muse.

’A great poet is what he wants to be, a great poet and a great lover’ says the voice-over in ‘De Muze’ [The Muse], Ben van Lieshout’s feature film that premieres this week at the Netherlands Film Festival. In ‘De Muze’, Van Lieshout follows the soul-searching journey of a young poet with writer’s block. The young man roams the wintry streets of Rotterdam, takes shelter in toilets with a book, or sits on his hotel bed not knowing what to do next. He dreams about a woman who will come to him, make love to him silently, and then disappear again. This is how she will unleash an avalanche of verses in him.

Alas. The young man gazes at his idol Monica Vitti at the cinema, runs into Vitti look-alike actress Tara Elders on the street, and still the verses refuse to flow. We all know the type, the exalted poet who yearns for the muse that will inspire him. The narrator in ‘De Muze’ – derived from an early Coetzee novel– is also well-aware that we know him. He mocks the boy. There is a malicious quality to his voice when he mentions his yearning for the muse while we see the poet under the cold fluorescent light of the library at night – at the mercy of his empty existence.

However, this lonely poet, who, as the narrator informs us, is young but feels middle-aged, is a lot less alone than he thinks at this year’s Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. There are several kindred wandering spirits in the premieres at the festival: passive dreamers hoping for deliverance, preferably in the shape of a young woman, and preferably blonde.

The festival opened with ‘Duska’, the latest feature film by Jos Stelling. Stelling is the founder of the ‘Netherlands Film Days’, as the NFF was called then, 27 years ago. In ‘Duska’, his comeback after eight years, director Stelling returns to the nostalgic universe of films like ‘De Wisselwachter’ [The Pointsman] and ‘De Illusionist’. ‘Duska’ is a film of few words, but the images are filled with gloom. Even the ribbed tea glasses and the coffee glasses in their plastic holders look melancholic. See those archaic glasses; this life has been on hold for years.

Regular Stelling-actor Gene Bervoets plays Bob, an older film critic in a grubby raincoat, who passes his days at the cinema and sleeps under black sheets at home. He has been working on a screenplay that is going nowhere and in the meantime spies on the pretty, blonde, young box-office girl at the cinema across the street. When the arrogant girl somehow ends up in his house after all, an unexpected Russian guest Bob once met at a far-away film festival, interrupts their get-together. And this good-natured Duska will not be chased off. Later on in the film the difference between reality and dream or fantasy becomes increasingly blurred, but one thing is sure: film critic Bob is no longer able to separate the two. As he is unable to act. Once the girl is in his bed, all he wants to do is look at her.

Mild male self-mockery dominates in ‘De Muze’ and in ‘Duska’, as it does in ‘Sextet’, the new Eddy Terstall film, a no-budget relay film about sex. As usual Terstall is much less circumspect. The six sex-stories are linked by the comments of a Flemish film teacher (again Gene Bervoets, this time in a painfully unfashionable leather jacket) who criticizes the structure of the film as well as its content, the sex that is functional or not - the product of a red-haired ‘nerd’ going through a midlife crisis (yes, Terstall himself) who wants to act out his sexual fantasies, according to the teacher.

In the funniest episode of the film old ex-football player an tv-personality Jan Mulder is in bed with a 24-year old fan who comforts him (‘you’re a real sweetheart’) after Jan has failed miserably. In the next episode the girl (no blonde but with wild curls and a magnificent behind) meets a new admirer in the person of the older, languishing actor Dirk Zeelenberg who to his own surprise releases something in her, even if he doesn’t know why.

Hmm. The position of the Dutch man in 2007. You can’t help but worry after seeing these new director’s films at the Netherlands Film Festival. The dreamer who wants to look rather than touch and who prefers the quest over finding the grail, was an ever-present character in Jos Stelling’s work. In a slightly different form we also know him from the films by Alex van Warmerdam, who turns the passive man into a much more forbidding character. Van Warmerdam’s anti-heroes from ‘Abel’ to ‘Ober/Waiter’, are no exalted poets or dreamers. They are immature fools, nasty characters who coldly peek down women’s dresses or make a grab for breasts just a little too eagerly.

Van Warmerdam’s men do not aim to endear, as Terstall’s and Stelling’s men do, and also the elderly men in search of women in recent popular films like ‘’N beetje verliefd’ [In love] (also in the running for a Golden Calf) and the Flemish box office hit ‘Man zkt vrouw’ [Man seeks woman] (Jan Decleir who has a thing for his Romanian maid).

Self-mockery prevails in these new men’s movies, but things never become unpleasant. Oh well, men will be men. Terstall is not shy about it: in the opening scene of ‘Sextet’ a brother bets his charming sister Lotje (Tara Elders) that she will not be able to make men reject her, no matter how dumb she sounds. And it is true, only one man prefers his book over pretty Lotje’s stupid oneliners. With Terstall we can laugh about it. This is the way it is, a natural phenomenon. The new man, like the old, needs a young girl, a muse, preferably blonde, preferably with little to say. It is a weakness he big-heartedly recognizes. We should not take this vice too seriously, but we will never manage to rise above it.

Jann Ruyters is a film- and literature critic for the dutch newspaper Trouw. The article originally appeared in Trouw on September 27th, 2007.

Translation: Maggie Oattes

© Trouw 2010, op dit artikel rust copyright.