The Northerners

At the start of the sixties a new street has been built at the edge of a forest. One side is finished and people have moved in; the other side is empty ground. The butcher eats meat constantly and his wife has stopped eating. The postman steams open the letters and reads them. A small boy prays for the Congo and believes he speaks with saints. In the forest a hunter nobody knows walks about. Alex van Warmerdam wrote, directed and acted in it; he plays the postman. What it builds is not the portrait of a town but a closed system. The street is cut off from the world and every character is alone with an obsession; none of them really looks at any other. The visual language is symmetrical and fixed. The camera barely moves, the frames are divided down the middle, and the people stand small inside the set; the comedy comes from that order breaking. The humour is dry and dark. Van Warmerdam is the best known name for this tone in Dutch cinema and this is among his most recognised works. The independence of the Congo and the news of the period are in the background; cut off as the street is, what happens outside leaks in through the radio. Who it is for: viewers who like absurd European comedy and tightly built formal work. Who it is not for: the humour is very cold, there is no bond with the characters, and some scenes are deliberately unpleasant.