An appealing summary and since Character won the 1997 Oscar for Best Foriegn Film, I figured what the heck and watched. I don’t agree with the user comment on IMDB that this Dutch film (yes, that means subtitles) was the best film of that year bar none (Good Will Hunting was far superior IMO) but it wasn’t bad; I’m thinking that the subtitles probably didn’t translate the subtleties of the original dialog all that well.
Summary: The meat of Character is set in the 1920s in the port city of Rotterdam where Jacob William Katadreuffe has grown up with a stern, silent mother and apart from his stern, silent, violent father; the parents never married (each other or anyone else, though the father did ask, coldheartedly and repeatedly) and in fact the boy seems to be the product of rape, to the extent that could be inferred). Mostly self-taught, Katadreuffe finds his way to the office of a friendly lawyer, De Gankelaar, who becomes a mentor and employer. The father, Dreverhaven, is well-known man in the city, a court bailiff who used his office to accumulate a sizable fortune but is never willing to share as much as a penny to help his son.
The film, which is told in flashback after the opening scene in which we see father and son in heated argument and then see Dreverhaven taken off in a body bag, mainly concerns the son as he grows from repeated confrontations with the father. A subplot with a beautiful woman in the law office primarily serves as a device to emphasize the futility of conflict.
Perhaps this is an artifact of the subtitles, but I felt the characters and dialog were very flat, straight and overly dramatic. Even though, for example, I had to read the subtitles to understand the dialog, I was still listening to the actors for tone of voice and such. Studies such as this ought to try and capture the complexities and vagaries of reality rather than use simplicity to make an obvious point, and director Mike van Diem hasn’t done that well. The acting was very strong, though, and I also enjoyed the unfamiliar time and place, which seemed well recreated.
moderately recommended, more so if you speak Dutch
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