‘When I was 23’, says Robert Jan Stips, ‘I thought: when I’m 30, I really should stop.’
You often hear young people say it. “Then and then I’ll stop.” They have a vague idea of what they will do next. Until ‘then and then’ arrives. Then the cessation, which has long presented itself as a reward, turns out to be little more than a void to be filled with nothing. Monday the NTR . sent Until the last gasp off, a Hour of the Wolfdocumentary by Marcel Goedhart. A film about older musicians. Rinus Gerritsen, guitarist for Golden Earring. Angela Groothuizen, still one of the Dolly Dots. Michel van Dijk, former singer of Alquin. Sister singing duo Lois Lane. Jan Rot.
When are you going to stop? When has it been beautiful? When ‘it is actually no longer possible’? Goedhart follows the singers along the way. The whirring of the highway. Residential areas. Artist entrances. Carrying instruments. Dressing rooms with pear-rimmed mirrors. Reading glasses that are brought out. Cardboard coffee cups, food from warm containers. And: waiting waiting waiting.
There’s a lot of excitement in it Until the last gasp, a lot of hope too. The protagonists, once stars, now build their own set, touch up their own make-up or wait their turn in an open-plan office.
‘Hello Hoogeveen!’ shouts the infectiously sober Groothuizen from the stage.
Until the last gasp is a beautiful document, showing artists who reconcile with changing circumstances, while the core remains the same. It’s a film that makes you question what an expression like ‘on your return’ really means, and whether it’s not much more like a one-way ticket, with some staying until the final station. Undeniably, the protagonists are at an advanced stage in their careers and in one case: in their lives. Illness and impending endings occasionally briefly come to the fore, when it comes to Golden Earrings George Kooymans, for example, who suffers from ALS. And initially Goedhart would make the film together with Henny Vrienten, until Vrienten became ill.
Jan Rot is also ill. On his way to a performance, he discusses the latest messages. Bad news. metastases. But why stop when you can keep going?
Rot: ‘If I can no longer walk, I can sit in a wheelchair. If I can’t move my arms, someone else can play the guitar.” Rot is happy when he acts, it is the state of being in which his illness has no role. Anyone who sees him lying before the concert, stretched out on three folding chairs in the front row, may wonder: why? Why endure all this? But see him standing in the wings, listening to the buzz, a moment later playing to a packed house, singing, joking about the end of the night he’ll probably make it to, and understand: that’s why.