In Dutch

I’ve been engaged in the hard labor of digging some gems out of the Low Country landfill of films from Holland, to show at the Clark as part of this summer’s “NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires.” I’m not going to write about most of them, since you don’t want to see them, trust me. Most recently, I watched back-to-back double features. Alex van Warmerdam’s The Dress (1996) was a watchable progression through the unfortunate events that befall a number of women who own a particular dress in succession, but I’m not sure whether the Dutch title De Jurk refers to that piece of clothing or the writer-director-star of the film. Further down the road of male boorishness was Siberia (1998), which had me pressing the fast forward button. More of same on display, of course, in Teetje Kippel (1975), which nonetheless slipped into the Paul Verhoeven slot in my film series -- more on that later. And finally, the diet was varied with a neat survey of female boorishness in Zus & Zo (2002), about three weirdish sisters who conspire to keep their gay brother from inheriting the family vacation hotel in Portugal, by marrying a woman according to the conditions of the father’s will. Somehow this last was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film, as much a mockery of the Academy as the just-released nominations of this year, or any other. (BTW, this obsession with the Academy Awards horse race has got to stop -- it’s a marketing tool that has been flogged to death, and has become utterly stultifying to film discourse.)