With knife (2022)

Directed by: Sam de Jong | 79 minutes | drama | Actors: Hadewych Minis, Gijs Naber, Roeland Fernhout, Nils Verkooijen, Oussama Ahammoud, Shahine El-Hamus, Vincent Linthorst, Nadja Hüpscher, Maas Bronkhuyzen, Steef Cuijpers, Sabri Saad El-Hamus, Kaltoum Boufangacha, Sylvia Poorschta, Esther Ker Scheldwacht, Phi Nguyen, Michel Sminia, Korneel Evers, Dim Balsem, Fabienne Meershoek, Tim Linde, Anis de Jong, Finn Poncin, Amine Benhamouch, Arianne Fennema, Dorothy Blokland, Akwasi Owusu-Ansah, Xem van Driel, Arjen Busscher, Chiel ten Cate

What two three-letter words can have consequences after a rash action on a back yard. The unusually oversized schoolboy Yousef (Shanine El-Hamus) wants nothing more than that one ultra shiny pair of sunglasses to impress his boyfriend Laurens. Lingo presenter Eveline (Hadewych Minis) equipped with twinkling braces dreams of a momentous change of course in her run-down career. Fate brings them together when Yousef steals her high-tech camera for journalistic purposes from the outraged TV presenter. Can he exchange it for those luxurious sunglasses? But during a police interrogation Eveline adds in a whisper: “…with a knife”. Can’t hurt insurance either. Yousef hangs, and Eveline hangs on his every word. She makes the endearing Yousef the object of the audiovisual quest for the true face of Dutch society. However, the truth cuts both ways in ‘With a knife’.

Shortly after ‘De Drie Musketiers’ (2021), a coarse-grained collaboration with the theater group De Warme Winkel, which was completely blown out of the spotlight, director Sam de Jong happily continues on the absurd tour for his fourth feature. Where de Jong held back reasonably with ‘Prins’ (2015) and the more raw-realistic New York production ‘Goldie’ (2019), with his last two productions he goes full throttle in terms of tonal and stylistic excesses. In fact, you couldn’t catch him for one hole in his earlier work, as the colorful animations in ‘Goldie’ testify. But for ‘Met knife’, de Jong goes completely overboard on style. Call the urge to experiment or overconfidently piss next to the pot, in any case it delivers about eighty minutes of strange scenes that Alex van Warmerdam might shy away from.

What if everyone is hip(star), including parents and grandparents, and has bought into the idea of ​​unbridled individualism? The decoration of the set and the characters is retro-future, modeled after eighties mistake, which sometimes makes you laugh. In addition, the pastel colors in the film radiate a faded, slightly dystopian, vision of the future as in ‘Welt am draht’ (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973), including robotic acting. Actress Hadewych Minis seems to be constantly wondering where on earth she ended up. It thus slyly takes the sting out of that bit of ‘real’ acting that Dutch film and television profess wholeheartedly.

“Your camera is your weapon,” Yousef tells Eveline as she turns the lens on him for the umpteenth time to ‘contextualize’ the truth about the robbery. The film is almost bursting at the seams with this kind of juicy Eddy Terstall/Theo van Gogh – media satire. Cinematically, ‘Met mes’ also breaks all kinds of ‘realism’ rules regarding continuity, cinematography and sound. De Jong sometimes only shows feet or diaphragms in the picture and puts in bland audio nonsense, such as parking noises under images of characters who take a seat. Visually, ‘Met Knife’ floats somewhere between the clownish visual jokes of Jacques Tati and the piercing film essays of Jean Luc Godard. In short, a slightly bitter potpourri of cinema.

Does the choice for a media satire reflect disappointment in the effect neoliberalism has on the current media landscape? Or will that anger be mocked again? Above all, De Jong shows that there are consequences to the indiscriminate production and consumption of audiovisual feed. This remains a valuable observation about our media, but unfortunately De Jong does not shoot as sharp as Godard.

Despite the tonal shift towards more drama, the obsession with media deconstruction comes at the expense of deepening Yousef and Eveline’s personal stories. They get snowed under in all those visual and intertextual gimmicks. However, this is undoubtedly part of the self-reflection of ‘Met mes’ as an audiovisual medium, because which images and sounds can still be trusted? After all, the media also has piles of scripts ready for ‘true’ drama. For example, De Jong does not completely escape the droste effect in which self-referral becomes an end in itself. Ultimately, this wonderful cinematic cocktail will taste significantly better than the other for one audience. But rest assured, it is not an explosive material.