Live! (2005)

Directed by: Willem van de Sande Bakhuijzen | 108 minutes | drama | Actors: Monic Hendrickx, Peter Blok, Anne-Wil Blankers, Tanja Jess, Sarah Jonker, Sophie van Winden, Roos Ouwehand, Ali Ben Horsting, Petra Laseur, Jeroen Willemse, Jeroen Krabbe

“Live!” is what the Dutch film needs! Directed by Willem van de Sande Bakhuijzen, we receive a package of beautifully stylized pictures, dialogues and scenes neatly packaged in a film in which drama and emotion are just as important as storyline and image. The tranquil life of typical Dutch days in Amsterdam with its canals and old mansions and new-build flats. And that, combined with a very positive attitude to life despite the daily misery of the day, makes this drama production happy. As contradictory as that sounds.

Van de Sande Bakhuijzen always manages to capture the human psyche in a very recognizable way. As in his other films, ‘Cloaca’ and ‘Familie’, and in the television drama ‘Oud Geld’, Van de Sande Bakhuijzen portrays characters that are so taken from life. Characteristics that are recognizable, but are never so magnified that they form a caricature. It gives the storyline the roughness of real life and therefore not everything has to be worked out in detail.

Various developments therefore run parallel to each other. For example, the father has an affair, the daughter is an unhinged gothic girl who walks around naked for almost the entire film, the other daughter needs a new heart, the asylum seeker seeks refuge with an elderly person with dementia and grandmother is “a cunt”. Some of the questions asked are answered or clarified at the end of the film, but most remain unanswered in the middle. Just like in real life, not everything works out and not everyone can be happy with the outcome. Live! is the acceptance of the turbulent course of life and the wisdom to fill this in according to one’s own insight. It is the resilience of humans, our capacity for imagination and with it the coloring of our own world; an ode to existence.

Only two minuses are the rape scene and the old writer’s flirtation with the young girl. Why do these eternal Dutch film clichés always have to come back? Have we still not outgrown the 1970s? Too bad, it doesn’t add anything and is a repeat of almost all other Dutch films….