Stages

Roos and Martin separated years ago. Both of them are in their forties. There is a son between them. Isaac is seventeen and lives with his mother. The boy has withdrawn into a world of his own. He hardly ever leaves his room. The parents meet regularly to talk about it. The subject is the state their son is in. Every conversation goes somewhere else, though. Neither of them has really absorbed the separation. Old wounds come back onto the table. Loneliness, anxiety and love sit in the same room. The film does not deliver this in a conventional way. The camera looks at faces from very close. The silences take up as much room as the talk. Marcel Musters and Stijn Koomen appear in the eighty minute film, a Dutch production Mijke de Jong finished in 2007.