There’s something about Dutch series that doesn’t immediately make up for it. Characters seem a bit archetypal, so they don’t immediately captivate. Important information is packaged in dialogues, which sometimes make them feel a bit wooden. Of course, in such a first episode you want to find out something about the era, about the mutual relationships. But a student gloating about Sartre, De Beauvoir, and woman as a social construct might make it clear that it’s 1968 and that she’s progressive—it also makes for an unnatural pub scene.
So it is with The dream of youth (KRO-NCRV), which was broadcast on television on Wednesday evening and appeared in its entirety on NPO Plus that same day. In the first episode you get to know many characters in a short period of time, who also experience a good part of the revolutions of the sixties, from a love in to the Paris student revolt. “People want more freedom, more equality, transparency, away with pillarisation, away with conformity,” says photographer Hans. “Just, bamrevolution, do you understand?”
But then, maybe it was the thirtieth minute, maybe earlier, suddenly everything happens. Explanation gives way to more showfewer countand before you know it, that same series is pretty good anyway.
When she turns out to have an incurable tumor, it seems mother Malherbe ‘nonsense’ to bother her family with it
The nine part The dream of youthby screenwriter Marnie Blok (Nobody in town) and director Bram Schouw (Brothers) is about a Catholic Brabant family with four children. The eldest two, Carla and Max, soon fly out – they get long hair, hippie dresses, big mouths. Daughter Suus conforms exemplarily to the mores of the family. Frans, the late arrival, seems especially rebellious. The nine episodes cover a period of forty years in the lives of the children, for which an impressive cast has been assembled. For example, Carla is played by Hanna van Vliet and Tamar van den Dop, and Max by Ko Zandvliet and Peter Paul Muller.
Especially strong is the inevitable battle between daughters and mothers, fathers and sons. Every child rebels against its parents, but at the same time is shaped by them. Everyone plays the role they had as a child in their family, but in the meantime they are also raised by the times they live in and the new role they take on as a parent. For example, is Frans rebellious, or did he become so because his father constantly corrects him? And is Suus a conformist girl, or did she become one because it’s the only way her mother sees her? Who you are is only partially in your control.
That inner battle emerges in the second episode in the story of the mother, beautifully played by Annet Malherbe. Her role is to keep the family together, to ensure that the house is clean, the children are well educated and preferably have some manners. She never took up space. When she turns out to have an incurable tumor, it seems to her “nonsense” to bother her family with it. And only when she knows she doesn’t have long to live does she dare to ask her husband about his illegitimate child, whom she knew about all these years. “Why didn’t you ever ask for anything,” he snaps at her. “You destroyed our family with silent reproaches.”
The series is not really good to binge, by the way. Without scattering spoilers: the family is not exactly spared. And too much suffering is best taken in moderation.
replaces Rinskje Koelewijn this week.