The Northerners (1992)

Directed by: Alex van Warmerdam | 108 minutes | comedy | Actors: Jack Wouterse, Annette Malherbe, Rudolf Lucieer, Loes Wouterson, Leonard Lucieer, Alex van Warmerdam, Veerle Dobbelaere, Dary Some, Theo van Gogh, Loes Luca, Jacques Commandeur

Director Alex van Warmerdam is known for his absurdist films, in which black humor dominates. In 1986 he made the famous film ‘Abel’ which is on the International Movie Database extremely weird is called and at the time won two Golden Calves: Best Film and Best Director. ‘De Noorderlingen’ did equally well in 1992, with Van Warmerdam also winning two Calves: Best Director and Best Actor (Rudolf Lucieer). And in 2003 there was ‘Grimm’, a strange and at least equally grim corruption of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. Van Warmerdam is clearly a director of un-Dutch proportions. The strange characters he creates would not look out of place in a film by Jeunet (director of ‘Delicatessen’ and ‘Amélie’, among others).

‘De Noorderlingen’ is therefore a film that primarily revolves around those characters and only in the second place about the story. The minor characters are so striking that it is difficult to designate one main character, but if he has to be designated it is Thomas (a role by Leonard Lucieer, who was seventeen at the time, instead of twelve). Thomas is the connecting factor between all the characters: he is the boy whose mother Martha (Annette Malherbe) is working hard to become the village saint with a hunger campaign and whose father Jacob (Jack Wouterse) is driven by that prudish mother to the most original rape actions. In addition, Dikke Willie (Theo van Gogh) wants to run him over with his moped, he is the favorite of the postman (Van Warmerdam himself), the savior of the negro (Dary Some) and the object of pleasure of the mysterious woman/wood nymph Agnes (Veerle Dobbelaere). ). And by rescuing the Negro and his relationship with Agnes, his storyline touches that of the barren bespectacled hunter Anton (Rudolf Lucieer).

As a postman, Van Warmerdam plays a key role (to be understood literally), he sees everything, hears everything, and above all reads everything. Because of him we know that Anton is infertile, which makes it logical that he rejects the advances of his sweet and beautiful wife Elisabeth (Loes Wouterson). The postman keeps a close eye on the few who remain in the village during the church service, so that the sexually frustrated characters Elisabeth (the wife of the barren) and the butcher Jacob (the husband of the saint) cannot serve each other immediately. We have to wait until the barren hunter discovers that the postman is steaming open the letters in the forest, after which the postman is immediately evicted from the village and things can get a bit out of hand.

The decor of the village itself is genius. With a large billboard in front of a laughing family (taken at the beginning of the film by a photographer who encourages them to look hopeful), this village is a model for the new housing estates of the 60s. However, it is not even a village too call it: two blocks of houses opposite each other, in no man’s land, with a dirt road in between, it looks like the decor of a western. The village was set up in a polder in Almere especially for the film. In addition to the village, only one other location plays a role: the forest. This forest, with its associated lake (in which Theo van Gogh falls with his moped and all) was made in its entirety in the studio. In terms of decors, De Noorderlingen has been kept relatively simple and therein lies a great strength: the characters are attached to each other and to the village, while the forest turns out to be a place where everything is possible, and the most horrific things happen.

Despite the fact that quite a lot happens in ‘De Noorderlingen’, the story does not seem completely finished. There is no clear climax. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing and in ‘De Noorderlingen’ it isn’t a problem either. So much attention is paid to the characters and to fun, exciting, nasty and frustrating situations that this tension is best to be missed. Yet as a viewer you wonder what kind of film it would have become if you had found out how each character ends.