Film and Film

“Karakter” Mike van Diem, 1996

Oscar winner in 1997 for best foreign language film.

The Dutch film receives this Oscar and immediately rose to fame, as also its director and protagonists did, and the focal point of the story was further revised, because of the theme is so recurrent in literature and cinema: the conflict parent-child, about how difficult and problematic it might be this relationship and in this film the way as it is dealt with the matter and its development, without any kind of concession to the spectator, with a hard, strong tone, generates tension and dramatic taste of reality, on an issue that has no time or nationality.

With a script written by the director, which is divided into several times, which is rebuilding and informing in the passing of several decades the various events of the pair of protagonists, accentuating in life, failures and triumphs of the son, so that you are weaving and making very clear the various facts that enumerates the story, as it is often the case that sometimes this fragmentation of time if it is poorly structured, delivered a confusing and not very understandable history. Here is just the opposite, so that the director shows his skills as a writer.

As director, displays a special talent to visually highlight the places where these lives pass, such as the visual drama that gives the entire film. The cinema, believe it or not and although almost nobody interested today, still has as essential the film image, and in this realization it can be seen through a camera that performs many levels - sequence (it is making different approaches and levels without any court), usually begins them from above and then it moves down or sideways following the action; repeatedly resorted to this method, which delivers a few planes and angles quite out of the ordinary, perhaps because the same film and its plot are also out of the ordinary. This is one of its most striking characteristics, commented very little by the way, which makes it a Chair on filmic language and movement of camera, i.e., a work full of style and visual talent.

The story and the events happening in the Rotterdam of the 20s of the last century, making a good reconstruction of time, with many extras and rebuilt exterior speak of a great production. The other great merit of the tape to highlight, associated with the ambience achieved not only of scenery, is the historical reconstruction of the sociopolitical scene of those agitated years when workers struggle for social demands, when building barricades in popular areas and the shots against the army was the common activity throughout Europe; a tragic chapter full of atrocities which is part of the history of mankind, contrary to the mistaken belief, widespread among others by the cinema, that in those early years of the 20th century everything was joy and dance. This war and historical moment is the background in which takes place this narrative, which as a whole, with all the elements presented and the remarkable way in which they were handled, makes this film is worthy of receiving this cherished award.