My plan for this entry was to pick a subject out of three variants. The first should have been "Der Himmel über Berlin" (aka "Wings of Desire") from over 40 years ago, which was on my list for a time that's expressed in two digits as well. I have to admit a gap in my cinema experience: Wim Wenders, whom I "successfully" avoided until now, because each movie I've run into (the last being the "Perfect Days" made in Japan) seemed likely to hit some touchy spots. But given the amount of self-inflicted late stress, I was curious how far I could push it, only that I didn't manage to watch it yet, and I had a deadline fixed for this entry. The second option was "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You", quite underrated, but that was too tense. Still, I can't miss the opportunity to recommend it as an example of something quite above average in camerawork for an indie budget, achieved only through the framing, angles, some touches on the colours, and a bit of support from the editing side. Therefore, with some luck (debatable..), I got to the third option, rewatched after almost 30 years, so yet another old movie, "Karakter".
What we have here is a Dutch movie, an adaptation of a novel from the '30s, with the action set in the same period's Rotterdam, following a triangle of three characters, the father, the mother and a son, from the birth of the latter to the demise of the parents. A.B. Dreverhaven, a bailiff, known to be more icier than the cold rains near the North Sea, employs a taciturn housemaid, Joba, and one night gets her pregnant against her will. When this situation is confirmed, the woman decides to leave and manage it on her own. After the birth of the boy, the father starts sending a series of telegraphic letters with the same content: a marriage proposal + a sum to help her, which the mother returns every month, choosing her name for the child: Katadreuffe. From there on, the action is centred more on the son-father conflict, the novel actually having "a novel of son and father" as its subtitle. The mother, with a presence that's more absent, has a role in the story, which I prefer to leave to be unravelled. In the foreground, we have the duel between Katadreuffe and Dreverhaven, which becomes more acute as the child grows, who, despite the precarious social conditions, manages to pursue a career, dealing with obstacles placed in his path by his own father. There's more to tell, but let's stick to the spoiler-free area.
It's interesting how the perception changes after more than two decades between the first and second times watching this. I knew it was a good movie, but it's not as flawless as I remembered. It's quite Hollywoodish as a technique and falls a bit on the theatrical side. The father's role is exceptionally well played by Jan Decleir, a Belgian actor whom I don't remember seeing in other work. However, we also have some overacting here and there, though that's subjective, as always. The camerawork alternates between scenes that could probably be taught in a master class, at least for how the chiaroscuro is integrated, but again, it gets a bit too far I think, with some noir tendencies that don't really fit. You can feel the score's impact from the intro, but afterwards, it's kept in balance. With all the minuses, it's probably one of the best assembled pieces of Western European cinema I've watched.
I had a "debatable.." in the intro for the reason that I don't think the third option was much luckier than the first would have been. "Karakter" is a movie that touches on plenty of aspects of life, from the obvious above, which relates to the parent-child relationship, to a secondary plane of romance that I didn't remember, which somehow fits as a complex replica of the mute one between the parents. But probably the finest nuance, interwoven with the rest of the story's threads, is a different part. "Le travail rend libre" is a phrase originating in a title of a German novel from the XIXth century, reused in French by Auguste Forel, a Swiss entomologist and psychiatrist, in a work about ants from the '20s, where I don't know how many connections are drawn with the functioning of the human brain, but if not there there were in some other works. The German sentence is one that was afterwards denaturated by placing it at the entrance of Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps, but I think it's basic sense is the one from the Forel version = the feeling of freedom is something provided by what occupies your time, something that in "Karakter" slowly grows, to the point when the young Katadreuffe doesn't observe much around him much besides his own carreer. That's clearly not the main theme of the movie, but it's the illusion that sustains overcoming the obstacles. Unfortunately, an illusion remains an illusion, with imminent danger upon waking. At least if you're not aware of it ;)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (slightly subjective)
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