The Northerners

The Northerners
Thomas' parents do not have much time for their son. They are too caught up in their sexual problems. He becomes friends with the mailman Simon, an immoral but kind man who doesn't refrain from reading other people's letters. The year is 1960 and twelve-year-old Thomas is fascinated by the news broadcasts on the radio from the Congo. Sometimes he dresses up as an african and calls himself Lumumba. His parents' marriage gradually gets worse.
A group of priests show up. They have a black man with them whom Thomas has to release.

Comment:
A man who has studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the school named after the legendary Dutch designer and architect Rietveld, is definitely a respectable man.
Like Alex van Warmerdam.
His film may have something defensive and not very cheerful about it, but with his background it is not hard to mildly overlook such things ..
The Northeners is in no way a bad movie.
After just five minutes of The Northeners I come to think of Lasse Hallstrom's My Life as a Dog.
The people who live in the godforsaken
town in northern Holland in the 60's, carry their isolation like a painfully heavy yoke. That which was supposed to have become a fully grown community, died a sudden infant death. All that came into being was a piece of road, inhabited by a few eccentric souls and surrounded by an immense forest. Their contact with the outer world
is limited to a transistor radio, a scantily trafficked bus service and a few letters that drop in every now and then.
Needless to say the people are affected by this desolation. It is as if they are not actually living there, but instead retire into themselves and escape somewhere else in their thoughts. That survival process takes various expressions in the different individuals.
Slowly and with a firm grasp, van Warmerdam captures the broken illusions and the feeling of despair. The story is driven towards a heightening distrust between the characters, a troublesome hostility. Yet, in the midst of this fatefully tragic atmosphere, there is - strangely enough something beautiful.
This is a pleasant film. Not least for ethnologists and amateur psychologists.
Rikard Lind

Orig. titel
De Noorderlingen: Medverkande
Leonard Lucieer, Veerle Dobbelaere: Producent
Laurens Geels, Dick Maas: Manus
Alex van Warmerdam: Foto
Marc Felperlaan: Talat språk
Dutch