Double Dutch

I’m still trying to scrounge up a half-dozen good films from Holland to show in conjunction with “NL,” a Berkshire-wide celebration of Dutch culture this summer. I had already ruled out For a Lost Soldier (1992) for its poor DVD transfer, even before the romantic scene where a Canadian soldier buggers a 12-year-old Dutch boy, after removing his wooden shoes and wet clothes. Set primarily at the end of WWII, this is essentially a gay “Summer of ’45,” with the Allied forces bringing sexual as well as military liberation. The story is framed by the boy, grown up to be an English-speaking choreographer, rehearsing teenaged boys and girls in a dance presumably titled like the movie, in remembrance of his initiation into the mysteries of love in the brief interval before the soldier was redeployed, never to be seen again. The film does convey a sense of place and character, but is not particularly well-made and its calm acceptance of pedophilia would be too politically incorrect to show at the Clark. The boy is evacuated from Amsterdam to a seaside fishing family, where a dozen occupying soldiers taking over a German watchpost on the water is the only sign of war, and you do get a sense of why the Netherlands is one of the “low countries,” with the land as flat as the sea.

Simon (2004) on the other hand, while provocatively permissive in its attitudes toward sex, drugs, gay marriage, and euthanasia, is a genuine find and something I would be pleased to show to an unsuspecting audience. It starts as a raucous comedy about the meet-cute-in-a-traffic-accident friendship between a gay dental student and the title character, a drug-dealing, sex-obsessed wild man, and sometime movie-extra in Thailand. They have an abrupt falling out, but meet again 14 years later, again traffic-accidentally. Simon is the successful owner of a chain of Amsterdam coffee shops, living large with his nearly-grown half-Thai daughter and son, and a retinue of old friends and girlfriends. But there is one problem -- he is dying of cancer. The rest of the film is a moving yet still humorous requiem, with hints of Longtime Companion and The Sea Inside (good company indeed!) in its tragicomic acceptance of mortality. Eddy Terstall is fast and funny in his writing and direction, effective and affecting. Independent of its telling take on the Dutch approach to life and death, Simon is a film that I would recommend to the curious, even if I’m a little reluctant to give it an outright rating of *7*.