Ingeborg Elzevier
By alternating documentary with fiction, a portrait is drawn of Peter van Straaten, eminent draughtsman of political cartoons, the long-term Parool serial Agnes and a countless series of painfully comical sketches of everyday life. Interviews with Van Straaten - outside, at home and at work - smoothly merge with dramatised excerpts from Agnes (played by people like Renée Fokker, Pierre Bokma and Hans Kesting). 'That's me, dressed up as a woman', he says about this creation. The camera peeks over his shoulder when Van Straaten makes his black-and-white drawings with pen and ink. His humour is harsh; he draws people in all their spinelessness, sadness and dishonesty, with a remarkable eye to facial expressions and postures. Through his drawings and stories, he also talks about his personal experiences with alcohol, relationships, family, health and sex - and his lifelong love for birds in the open field.
When Louise (70) and Max (72) meet, it is love at first sight: they abandon their sleepy lives and travel to the South of France, where they become the terrors of the 'Route du Soleil'. They rip off naïve tourists with their act as a sad old couple: a second youth that goes further than their wildest dreams. Based on a true story.
The poet Valentijn Boecke meets his former teacher Mieke. They have a short relation. After a while Mieke appears to be pregnant. Valentijn is through with Mieke and leaves her...
Based on the novel by Louis Couperus, De Stille Kracht is set at the end of the nineteenth century and concerns the cultural gap between East and West, that is between the Netherlands and their colony on Java. The Dutch colonists, who nominally rule Java, realize that the island maintains its own natural order by way of a hidden force, goena goena, a term denoting magic as well as depths of eastern cultures that westerners cannot probe.
