The President (2011)

Directed by: Erik de Bruyn | 90 minutes | comedy | Actors: Achmed Akkabi, Najib Amhali, Charlie Chan Dagelet, Dirk Zeelenberg, Rosa Reuten, Ton Kas, Frank Lammers, Ruben van der Meer, Matthias Schoenaerts, Peer Mascini

Erik de Bruyn made his debut as a director and screenwriter in 2000 with ‘Wilde Mossels’, a riotous, Zeeland coming-of-age film that still regularly graces favorites lists. Years later, in 2007, he was able to bring the more restrained, intriguing ‘Nadine’ to the screen. In 2011 follows, like pincers on a pig, ‘The President’. A clumsy film about a Moroccan goatherd who, in an undefined future without a royal family, becomes president of the Netherlands. Certainly not because the people want it, although ‘The President’ would have you believe that, and perhaps because the screenwriter (Marco van Geffen) designed it that way. Whatever label you put on it – political satire, laugh-or-I-shoot comedy, commercial audience film: ‘The President’ fails. Anyone familiar with De Bruyn’s earlier work can only fear that ‘The President’ is a cynical towel in the ring from a director who failed to get other projects off the ground.

The story begins when ‘Joes’ (Akhmed Akkabi) and his uncle Hamid (Amhali) lose sight of a herd of goats. Yelling and gesturing, the owner (and Joes’ mother) demands compensation. Next stop: an asparagus field in the republic of the Netherlands, where two ‘roguish’ vodka Bulgarians (Frank Lammers and Matthias Schoenaerts) wander around. We will see them many more times in this film. That is to say: every time the story has reached a dead end, the two mustachioed circus bears perform a trick for entertainment. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, meanwhile, opportunistic hobgoblins Vlonder (Dirk Zeelenberg) and a right-wing tuttebel (Rosa Reuten) made of hairspray are competing for the presidency. In ‘The President’ these two storylines are brought together, because apparently they have to be brought together. Just as the Netherlands seems to be a republic here, because otherwise the title of the film would have made no sense and the impossible plot would have become impossible. In any case: after Joes has tried to rescue his young Romanian sweetheart Mila from a burning barrack, Vlonder and his spin-doctor Aart (Ton Kas) immediately adopt him as the nation’s hero and ‘right hand’. Soon Joes the politician turns out to be more popular than Vlonder himself and before Vlonder realizes it, Aart has knocked him off the stage to make Joes candidate number one. Why Joes is so popular? Perhaps the creators themselves had no idea. Perhaps that’s why the music starts to blare through once Joes finally addresses his troubled compatriots. Where that is not the case, he gets no further than some gibberish about ‘we all do it together’. It wouldn’t look out of place in a playgroup, in ‘De President’ it doesn’t suffice as a frivolous reference to the nonsense that our real politicians sometimes spew. And what they still win votes with. In this film you also see the people (Chinese in sewing workshops, housewives on the market, poop families on the couch) have their fingers crossed for our Joes, but as a viewer you can’t go along with it. Because his quasi-wisdom and quasi-connecting words and quasi-relativizing remarks are simply too weak.

On the one hand, ‘The President’ seems to want to paint a crazy picture with the help of two Moroccan illegal immigrants of the Eastern European conditions that arise when populism and ignorance in politics make The Hague definitively chopped up by content. Think: synchronized troopers and a tropical swimming pool in the presidential backyard. On the other hand, the film gives one hug after another pat on the head of the man who is both a willing victim and an empty-headed main responsible. Joes, yes, the nihilistic president who leaves a country in chaos to search for his sweetheart in a fat Mercedes. It is to repay nonsense with nonsense. That pinches, that clashes, and it probably doesn’t make you laugh.