Publieke werken

Great movie!! My favorite part is when, at a funeral, you see a graveyard worker pulling a blanket from a caskit. Why i like this part so much you ask? Well maybe the fact that the person acting as graveyard worker is ME. But it's not a bad movie in general but not for brood audience cause it's a historical drama.

Based on a fictional Dutch book speculating on how the two 19th century homes that the Victoria Hotel was built around came to be. Amsterdam's Central Station is directly across the street from the Victoria Hotel, which was built in the late 1880's. If you look closely at the hotel you will notice that there are two single dwellings that the hotel was built around. This is the story of how that came to be and it involves three cousins and the attempt to help some poor peat farmers achieve a better life in America.

This is a very sad but well meaning drama. The letter from the peat farmers really saved this from being a total tragedy. I loved the images of the hotel then and the hotel now.

It is the precursor to my city's Up house (which sadly I witnessed the monstrous fitness center, etc being built around a poor old lady's home here in Seattle ), with the exception that in the modern build they made no attempt to make the building beautiful and the owner wasn't holding out for more money...she just wanted to live in peace in her home.

Three story lines, maybe effective in the book but not in this movie. The most interesting part, only 30 minutes, is the struggle between the protagonist trying to sell his shop and the investor who doesn't want to pay what the shop owner is asking. The rest seems only padding to fill it up to feature length. To bad, because the eye candy is satisfying, i.e. the image of old Amsterdam.

Dutch cinema is always a bit of a hit or a miss. There are some great directors and actors (although most actors focus on theater, as with Gijs Scholten van Aschat who is mainly a theater actor), but the movies have little budget and tend to be bland comedy-dramas.

Having said this, budget is being a bit more generous in recent years. Most historical movies from the Netherlands in recent years have a tendency to be action flicks, as with the movies Michiel de Ruyter, Kenau and het Bombardement. Although the visuals due to the higher budgets are stunning (especially in Michiel de Ruyter) they lack a lot in historical accuracy and feeling. Michiel de Ruyter has little historical context and especially the behavior of the characters does not feel like the seventeenth century (children disturbing their father and jumping on his bed for example).

Publieke werken succeeds in grasping the stunning visuals used in those other movies but tell a much more layered and original story. Centered around two cousins (fictional characters to be precise) this movie gives them a lot more temporal feel. The dialogue and behavior of most characters is distant, which is in my humble knowledge mostly accurate and a lot of the feelings the characters are experiencing are oppressed and show just a little. This gives a certain historical distance and I find that praise-worthy. On the downside this makes the plot sometimes a bit hard to follow.

The effect I loved the most is the lighting in this movie. It felt very natural and accurate, scenes at night where mostly lit by oil lamps or candles and the scenes inside are mostly darker even when it is day. Although probably some effect was used to get this it felt as a very natural portrayal of a society where electricity was not readily available, although around the corner, as the movie is set in 1888.

The biggest downside to this movie, coherent to a lot of Dutch movies, was in the audio mixing. For some reason Dutch movies tend to mix the spoken lines softly and the music really loud. Maybe this is due to the reason I watched this movie on television, but still it is a trend. As a native speaker of Dutch this makes some lines for me hard to understand. If you are watching with subtitles this would probably be of no concern to you.

I give this movie 8 out of 10. A historical movie which let you experience the historical distance of his subjects, good acting, magnificent visuals, original plot and deep characters.

What a sad movie, I sincerely hope it's just fiction, so much suffering, all in favor of a greater good that didn't come true (or did, the totally appropriate translation, rare thing, "A Noble Intent", the script, the story in itself is filled with good intentions, altruistic people, who for their good ambitions, fail, reconstruction of phenomenal historical photography... Beautiful and sad, violence and kindness...