cine club

[Camden Palace Hotel]

Hey everyone,
Just wanted to let you know about our next screening, its on this thursday, 29th of April at 8:00pm. Its a film called De Noorderlingen (The Northerners) from Holland.

Alex van Warmerdam’s award-winning second feature is set in a remote small
Dutch village in the newly reclaimed Northlands in 1960. The village is
actually just one street of a new village that was never completed, and the
behavior of its inhabitants is invariably determined by their unsolved
sexual problems, leading to a number of comic situations depicted in a
tradition of absurdist black humor. The director himself plays a curious
postman who can’t live without opening other people’s letters to read of the
bizarre and intimate secrets of the eccentric inhabitants of the estate. A
darkly amusing satire of Dutch village bourgeois conventions and repression
executed with visual and dramatic flair. If its imagery, right down to its
Freudian forest of libidinous fantasies, seems terribly obvious, its plot
machinations are still fun to follow.

The director and the actors, who play their roles broadly, obviously relish
spoofing small-town life and its simmering pressures. There are moments when
the film suggests Sherwood Anderson’s "Winesburg, Ohio," reinvented in the
Netherlands of 1960 as a surreal sideshow of voyeurs, fetishists and
eccentrics.

The show the Belgian priests bring to the town is really an exhibition
within an exhibition. For the overriding premise of the film is the notion
of human nature and its quirks as something to be observed as though under
glass. The attitude with which the director pulls the strings is as amused
and prankish as Shakespeare’s Puck perched in a tree crowing, "Lord, what
fools these mortals be."

Hope to see you all there.

Thanks

[Dan]

thanks for that

[Author]

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