No Wilders for a while, was my plan for this TV evening. I would rather talk about poverty. For 100 Days in the forgotten neighborhood (NPO3), Nicolaas Veul and Tim den Besten will live in the Laakkwartier in The Hague. They do their internship there as social workers. In the neighborhood, residents struggle with “nuisance, debts, poverty and loneliness.” When the duo meets the white residents, they immediately start spouting racist things about neighbors with a migration background. They would ruin the neighborhood and take over the country.
Yes, the report has only just started and we are already back to Wilders’ apparent problem of migration. How do you deal with this? Veul and Den Besten are also concerned. Should they push back, Veul wonders. Well, they come to do research into the neighborhood, so you have to listen and understand, says Den Besten: “The program is not called: 100 days of lecturing.” The subject is avoided for the rest of the broadcast.
Veul and Den Besten previously made similar report series about a secondary school, a psychiatric clinic and a retirement home. The magic of those previous series cannot yet be found in this new series. Perhaps a disadvantaged neighborhood is too large, too complex for their approach. The previous ones were about small communities. Furthermore, the slum has already been considerably degraded. Since Guilty (2016) it is clear how the poverty trap works. Geer, Goor and the Meilandjes have also come to stay.
Distance
While Veul and Den Besten try to get as close as possible to their subject – even live or work there – documentary maker Jurjen Blick wants to keep his distance. In the five-part series The last chance (Monday, NPO2) he follows people who have the last chance to achieve something. That could really be anything. An adopted woman has no contact with her biological mother, who is in her eighties, but now wants to know who her father is. A boxer is actually too old at the age of thirty, but the boxing association gives him one last chance to qualify for the European Championship. An ecologist gets one last chance to eradicate a devastating weed on Texel.
These people have no time to waste. It is nice that Jurjen Blick portrays that race against the clock painfully slowly and with a lot of repetition. Just like in As Slow as Possible by John Cage with which he starts the series – a minimalist piece of music that is supposed to last 639 years. Blick’s style characteristic is a dominant voice-over in which an omniscient narrator in a literary, musing style makes the story bigger than it is. The unruly choice of music also helps to turn an everyday story into a mighty epic.
In The Cubicle Man (2013-2016), this worked very well: an old school anthropologist looked at specific communities in the Netherlands with a sympathetic distance. But in its award-winning series Piece (2019), that voice-over bothered me. I felt like the struggles of people in recovery would have been more compelling with less turgid language. In The last chance that also applies. It is not without reason that the film immediately becomes much more alive when one of the characters explains what the problem is, without the voice-over. The chosen stylistic device of delay and repetition also works against the documentary. The dilemmas that were fascinating in themselves gradually became less interesting to me. What remains is that Blick is trying something different with the genre, and that is always to be welcomed.