All great works of art, whether it’s a painting, an installation, videos or films, a sculpture or a book, tv shows, poetry, dance or a theatre piece, share one thing: they are either solely, or mainly or at least in the first place about power. I especially know quite something about films and most of my (and yours, rest assured) favourites are about just that.
Now when it comes to exquisite film making on power —or put differently; who exactly is top notch in the highest level of film making in my humble opinion?— I could name a few, but the most versatile of them all can be no one other than Stanley Kubrick. He makes ’em all, war films on power, costumed flicks on power, sci-fi on power, comedy on power (!), romance on power, horror on power and (finally) drama/dialogue films on power. Now, Kubrick’s dutch equivalent if I may call him so, or at least whoever got closest to the mighty Kubrick out here in the (literally translated) hollow lands are first Verhoeven (but he’s not counting because of actually being more of a Hollywood man) and second Theo van Gogh (1957-2004). Especially ‘06’, ‘Loos’, ‘Interview’ and ‘06-05’ come to mind as being my favourites (I think 06 is maybe the best dutch film ever made). Van Gogh had an eye for ‘that what was really dutch’ and combined it with a couple of layers of Hitchcockian suspense eventually leading to outstanding, original product bursting with love for story telling and cinema.
His last feature film ‘06-05’ a conspiracy film about the assasination of Pim Fortuyn (a dutch republican politician about to become prime minister) by the BVD (a sort of dutch FBI’ish organisation) was written by (ex-BVD agent) Tomas Ross AKA Willem Hogendoorn. Obviously a brilliant man, or else he couldn’t have written one of the most compelling stories yet to have been told on dutch television, namely that of prince Bernhard van Lippe-Biesterfeld (AKA Bernhard Leopold Frederik Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter), Prince Consort to the late Queen Juliana, father of the current queen, Queen Beatrix. The story’s called Bernhard, Schavuit van Oranje (Bernhard, the Oranje’s scoundrel – Van Oranje is the name of the dutch royal family) and it’s awe fucking some.
Now, the twentieth century was a wild one and Bernhard assumingly took lots of advantage of it being an age that was actually not so much as the ending of the last thousand years, yet more so the beginning of a whole new era, a childly age so to speak, in which all sorts of dealings and etiquette had still to be sorted out and one could still afford to making an honest mistake. Now take that as the basis for the story and add the future to it and it’s easy to read between the lines a royal family drama in four generations of a not-too-royally behaving (yet pretty charismatic) man, who after growing apart from his wife first sees something of himself in his daughter’s behavior, but eventually loses her too as she catches up with him and sees through his games (better than he does himself) and finally condemns his flimsy, wannabe-playboy’ish lifestyle.
Excellent performances by (especially) Eric Schneider (the old Bernhard), and Daan Schuurmans (the young Schuurmans and steadily becoming directors’ Pim van Hoeve’s Robert De Niro), Ellen Vogel (beautiful!!!), Loes Haverkort (very persuading) and most of the others. Unfortunately the last episode was yesterday, so you have no reason not to go see all of ’em NOW on uitzending gemist.
