After the program about salmon sperm, I was once again tempted by a promising title on Tuesday. The episode of On the way to love (NPO 3) was called ‘Wild camping in a horror film’. In this dating program, ‘vanlifers’ look for a loved one. Vanlifers – that sounds like people sentenced to life in a van. They indeed live in a camper with which they travel through Europe.
The love candidates have to travel a bit. Anyone who doesn’t like it has to get out and be exchanged. Thanks to permanent travel, candidates can immediately take the holiday stress test. How does the early relationship hold up if the camper does not want to climb the slope? Or if you have to camp illegally in a parking lot?
For the latter, the promising title had to be lived up to. Camper Kyle wants to spend the night in a parking lot, but his romantic candidate Sander finds that scary. There are a lot of crows, which reminds him of a horror movie. In addition, the parking lot is located next to a cemetery and a military training area. In an online parking lot review, he reads: “The dogs froze in fear from the gunshots.”
Kyle is not the angriest so he gives frightened Sander his way; they go and stand with a farmer further on. The horror from the promising title has evaporated. Sander’s chances of love have also evaporated, I suspect, because Kyle obviously doesn’t feel like having a coward as a co-driver.
So no parking lot horror. Disappointed! Fortunately, love candidate Myrthe came along and said to vanlifer Joris: “I noticed that I was being penetrated by Shiva energy to become more surrendered.” Huh? Vanliferian is a dialect that I have not yet fully mastered. I know Shiva. That is the Hindu god with four arms. God of well-being, father of the storm gods, popular with women, emasculated by jealous husbands. That will be something in that camper van.
Camperman Joris had indeed understood Myrthe: “I feel more bubbly energy.” On Wednesday evening they will lie naked next to each other in bed, the preview promised.
Conversations with Nino
Monique van de Ven is camping in a Breton beach house when she receives a stranded young cyclist at her door. He stays for a day, the older actress tells him her life story. In A woman like Monique (The Hour of the Wolf, NPO 2) the actress plays herself. The framework is fictional, but what she tells is real. Sounds like a confusing mix of feature film and documentary, but in practice it is clear.
Interspersed with film fragments, Van de Ven explains how her debut role in… Turkish Delight as a twenty-year-old she immediately became a Dutch film star. After that, she regularly starred in films that broke open women’s taboo subjects. For example, she played a woman with post-partum depression Breathlessa married woman who gets into a lesbian relationship in A woman like Evaand a woman who loses her baby in Romeo.
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The film fragments are not given titles or dates. The stories remain somewhat superficial and sunny. That’s because the cyclist, played by Joes Brauers, never asks questions. Another factor is that Van de Ven is a positive person who does not want to dwell on problems from the past. A third aspect is that fifteen minutes were cut from the original film version for the television version, which resulted in the elimination of some dark passages – about sexism on the film set, for example, and the evil role in it of her ex-husband, cameraman Jan de Bont.
The film inevitably leads to the great tragedy in the actress’s life: the death of Nino, her twenty-month-old child. She says that she still talks to Nino, she wonders who he would have been now, 32 years later. Then it becomes clear why director Claire Pijman chose the frame story with the young cyclist, who appears and disappears somewhat mysteriously. Fiction makes possible what a documentary cannot: a short, moving meeting of mother and son.
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