Dutch Treat

What seems like a period piece, set in World War 2, is a treatment of a topic that most filmmakers wouldn't touch, and yet, it's more common than one would expect.

Set in the Netherlands, Jerome (pronounced Yeh-room) is separated from his mother and must leave Amsterdam for a safer place, along with many other kids. They are sent to a rural, religious town, where locals adopt the kids until the war is over. Jerome has made a friend who he hangs out with at the water.

From this, you already get a sense that 13 year old Jerome might like guys, as he likes his friend, and the older son of the family he lives with. The story is done surprisingly subtly. The issue of whether he's gay or not is simply not brought up by the family, who may have thought that he's so young, and the concept so unbelievable, that they can't conceive of it.

Midway through the film, the Netherlands, which had been occupied by Nazi Germany are liberated by the Allies, in particular, Canadians. One Canadian in particular, Walt, looking a bit like Charlie Sheen doing Tom Cruise from Top Gun, seems to like Jerome a lot. The Canadians speak English throughout, and indeed there's a fair bit of English spoken.

Let me take a brief aside. If you watch foreign films (this one Dutch) and there is English, it's often the case the English sounds a bit off. The intonation doesn't quite flow, maybe because it doesn't have to.

Indeed, the film is bookended by the older Jerome played by the only actor I recognize in the entire film, Jerome Krabbe, doing choreography of a modern ballet that reflects his experience growing up during the war.

It's true that the average person doesn't know who Krabbe is. He was cast as the bad guy in The Fugitive. That was a bit of unusual casting, to find a Dutch actor when an American might have done. I've also seen Krabbe in The Fourth Man, a weird dream of a film by Paul Verhoeven, he of Robocop and Basic Instinct fame, when he was still making films in native Holland.

The story is a bit nostalgic, and although the film is set during the War, any evidence of ongoing war (bombs, soldiers in battle) are missing. Indeed, the story is focused on the rather bland ongoings of Jerome's life.

When the Canadians liberate this quiet religious Dutch town, many of the male soldiers are hanging out with the local women. This is not a topic that you see very often in films that are ostensibly about way. In this backdrop, Walt hangs around with Jerome, giving him candy, going to the water with him, teaching him how to dance, telling him how he really didn't want to go to war, telling him how special he is.

At various times, you feel someone is going to say something, whether it be other members of Walt's troop, or the stern religious father where Jerome stays, or even Henk who he has to share a bed with because the family is poor. None of that happens. There's one seen where they are almost caught, when one of the Dutch girls appears to have been made upset by one of the other soldiers and comes in to talk about her feelings to the two guys.

On the one hand, you have to admire a film that doesn't take the obvious plot point to have a confrontation of an older man and a teenage boy. The film isn't indeed trying to say the teen has been exploited. It hints at a sexual relationship, but doesn't dwell on it in depth, just enough to show it exists. It's also careful to show that Jerome would have been gay, was already having some feelings about it.

It also shows that in a conservative culture, perhaps the thought that someone is gay (the term sissy is used, though it's translated) may not have been seriously entertained. This lack of confrontation does rob the story of some drama.

The relationship isn't that well established, unfortunately, perhaps because Jerome seems too much like a kid, which is fine, in the sense that these relationships can work out that way, and the film tackles a tough idea with a soft touch (the subject being, is it OK for an older man to have relations with a barely teenage kid), rather than the one explored by, say, Beautiful Girls where Timothy Hutton's character falls for teen Nathalie Portman, since she seems much older than her early teens. But that film could be said to be a (realistic) copout, having a teen that seems adult-like being the object of desire.

Indeed, For a Lost Soldier despite not presenting a particularly compelling case for why Walt and Jerome fall for one another does at least treat the subject as not overtly hideous as many other films would do.

Walt eventually disappears without a trace, when the Canadian forces leave, and Jerome is distraught until his mother comes back for him. He tells her he wants to go to America.

The bookends are a bit odd. Once the flashback is over, you return back to Jerome as an adult (the director does play a cinematic gimmick having the older Jerome talk directly to the younger Jerome, something I saw in Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden), he's become a choreographer, presumably somewhere in Canada. The dance represents his youth growing up (how that got funded is somehow not addressed).

The dance part is a bit odd, strangely juxtaposed on a nostalgic period piece, and the film ends with the possibility that, all these years later, maybe Jerome can find Walt again (though, one imagine that either Walt is dead, married to a woman, arrested for his desires, or in a loving relationship with a man). It ends hopefully, though realistically, you just can't imagine it would be.

In this sense, the story resembles Mysterious Skin, but where that film shows the corrosive effects a pedophile for two young kids, one who remembers this period of time rather fondly, this one has a much milder sense of any potential damage. Indeed, were it not for the relationship at the center of the story, it would have been rather bland, but effective story of living in the past.

Despite the rather deft touch by the director, this is just the kind of film that you couldn't make in the U.S. given the conservative culture that the U.S. has where gay marriage is even a hot-button topic. It's been said that you might not even be able to make this film in Europe, but the Netherlands is perhaps the most liberal of European countries, and the Dutch have often made their share of controversial films.

It does go to show that many times, people demonize subject matter because it seems inherently wrong, and can't imagine that people would seriously do certain things. Indeed, such topics as sado-masochism is not really taken seriously in film, and is almost always played for odd spectacle. Pedophilia, a topic you'd imagine would be far more controversial, is the subject matter of a lot of films, while sado-masochism is the subject matter of nearly none. Can such a topic be intelligently treated?

As an addendum, I looked up the guy who played Walt, an actor named Andrew Kelley. He's only been in two films. This one, and one called Sorceress that is a collaboration between Canadians and the Dutch. Kelley seems to have that market cornered.