Come Here I Kiss You (2020)

Directed by: Sabine Lubbe Bakker, Niels van Koevorden | 100 minutes | drama | Actors: Tanya Zabarylo, Valentijn Dhaenens, Tom Vermeir, Wine Dierickx, Tijmen Govaerts, Stefan Perceval, Greet Verstraete

“Come Here I Kiss You” is about family relationships and time, and how even that can’t heal everything. About your origin and why you become who you are. About the past that catches up with you and the relationships you enter into.

“Come Here I Kiss You” is divided into three parts called “the mother,” “the love” and “the father.” We follow the Flemish Mona as a nine, twenty-four and thirty-five year old. Mona is nine years old when her mother dies. Her father soon remarries a younger, unstable woman who demands all the attention in the house. From an early age, Mona feels responsible for the good order at home. She tries to conform to her manic stepmother Marie (Wiene Dierickx), in an attempt to save this new family. Not much later Marie becomes pregnant, but even the arrival of a baby does not illuminate the dark cloud that hangs over the family.

In the second part, Mona meets the elder Louis (Valentijn Dhaenens), a narcissistic and complicated writer. She stands on the sidelines of her life and effaces herself, including in her relationship. Meanwhile, she works as a dramaturge in a theater company led by Marcus (Stefan Perceval), a domineering and egocentric director. Here too Mona disappears into the background, unless something needs to be solved, because then she is always there for everyone. Inside, Mona knows she’s going to be walked all over her, but she can’t change. She’s still that nine-year-old girl desperately trying to pick up the shards.

In the last part, Mona’s father becomes terminally ill. She is still with Louis, but the confrontation with her father’s mortality forces her to think more and more about life. A tentative reconciliation takes place on his deathbed, but Mona is about to drown. Can she finally take matters into her own hands?

Just like Griet op de Beeck’s novel of the same name, ‘Come here that I kiss you’ can move you to tears. He grabs you by the throat and forces you to look at your own past and future. It is confrontational and disarming and therefore very truthful. It almost feels like stepping into a random living room and taking a look at the intimate world that takes place behind closed doors. It is not surprising that there is a documentary touch to it. Before this feature debut, director duo Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden made the highly acclaimed and moving documentary ‘Ne me quitte pas’, about two friends who found each other in loneliness and alcoholism. ‘Ne me quitte pas’ and ‘Come here let me kiss you’ share the natural tragedy of life.

It’s not until ‘Come here that I kiss you’ has finished that you realize that the oppressive feeling is partly caused by the camera that dares to get extraordinarily close to the actors. In every scene there is a subcutaneous tension that gives the viewer a stuffy feeling. The scenes often start out lively and affectionate, but you know that the atmosphere can change at any moment. It is precisely this that makes the scene so sensitive; you can love each other and destroy each other at the same time. Ambivalent as the title: a loving command.

The characters are incredibly well thought out. You can see from this that Griet op de Beeck has done a huge part of the preparatory work. Mona already existed for the most part but Tanya Zabarylo has given her a clear face. Her gaze and silence literally speak volumes and as poetic as the book is, the dialogues are so realistically natural. The actors know how to portray their characters in such a way that you could write such a drama about them individually.

‘Come here let me kiss you’ makes you think about your own family and the families around you. How life runs and works differently for everyone. Everyone comes from somewhere and is shaped by it. It is amazing that a book adaptation can say just as much with fewer words.