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PostPosted: Thu Mar 08, 2012 5:10 am 
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HANNAH HOEKSTRA IN HEMAL

Dutch girl finding herself, mainly through sex

She is young, she is beautiful (but too thin), she is rich (or her father is), she's annoying, and she's sex-crazed, and did I mention she's annoying? This is Hemel (Hannah Hoekstra), a Dutch girl, and her name means Heaven. She is close to her father Gijs (Hans Dagelet), who's in the art auctioning business, apparently, and maybe Hemel's promiscuity competes with her father's, because he has had a series of affairs all Hemel's life, sometimes with women not much older than she is now. Her mother died shortly after she was born. This is an accomplished film, a beautiful film, and a film that should put its Dutch director Sacha Polak on the international sexy art film map. Hemel seems sex-obsessed and scenes show plenty of frontal nudity and other body-realism, including her peeing standing up, something you may not have seen in a non-porn film up to now. But this isn't a female Shame, though at first it might seem so. Hemel is also looking for a grown up man (another, better father?), and this film unlike McQueen's, at least passingly alludes to a network of complex familial relationships. There is something short of depth here, partly through the limitations of the (annoying, did I say?) protagonist's point of view, partly through the stylish but narratively stunting organization of the film into eight disparate titled segments.

Polak's method, especially initially (she gains greater credibility as time goes on) is too easy and too obvious. She opens with two very white naked bodies lying in plain daylight. This is her first of a series of pickups, the white man (Ward Weemhoff) who shaves Hemel's pubic hair (with the stand-up peeing scene as a bonus). This is not, as in a certain Romanian film, a sequence of effective character development or interesting conversation, though Hemel is annoying, right away. What is developed is the sense that the film is trying hard to seem bold about sex and to show that its protagonist is experimenting in that area. A little obvious variety: she picks up, screws, and dumps an Arab man (Abdullah El Baoudi), who is annoying in his own right (he declares Algerian men, of which he is one, to be the worlds' best lovers), and to whom she behaves in a crudely racist manner, and then kicks him out of bed when he wants to make out after sex. Next comes an S&M guy, who chokes her and knocks her around a bit. And that about does it except for a sexy Flamenco singer in Spain, but she only gets to dance with him. (Contractual obligations, since this is a Netherlands-Spain co-production?)

After the establishment of the sexual obsession, what follows is the "Father and Daughter" segment, which establishes that Hemel and her dad have a solid relationship, if one that is too like a platonic marriage. When Gijs introduces Sophie (Rifka Lodeizen), a Christie's colleague he seems really serious with, Hemel shows jealousy and discomfort. It is at this point if not long before that it becomes clear that, as Variety put's it, "Helena van der Meulen's screenplay is a tad too schematic." More than a tad. Variety is right that the scene when Hemel barges in on a brithday party for her "ex-stepbrother" Teun (Maarten Heijermans), a devout Protestant with a fiancee who's a virgin, they having pleged not to have premarital sex, this adds an interesting, unexpected note and is "well-observed." But Heijermans somehow seems a "tad" too pretty for his character, the whole film leaning too much toward the visual -- helped, naturally, by the beautiful camerawork by Daniel Bouquet.

The next key piece in the not-so-puzzling puzzle is the scene in which Hemel is first in bed with and then walking on the beach with a more grown up, nicer, bearded, married, tight-lipped lover (Mark Rietman) whom she wants to "get inside" and "know about," etc. In other words, she has found a guy who might be of interest outside of bed. Much of the film is about Hemel's close relationship with her father, whose girlfriends she is sometimes close to and sometimes jealous of. Due to the sex obsession and the closeness, for a bit we may be forgiven for expecting an incest scene. Instead, coming in out of a chilly rain, there's "only tea," with an older woman, perhaps an earlier lover of her fathers' -- this relationship is confused -- who seems to have known Hemel when she was very young.

Hoekstra does remarkably for a recent acting school graduate who's never been in a film, just as Polak does well for a director who's never made a feature. This could be straight to video stuff it it were merely sexy and ravishing to look at, but I realize that -- though penetrating analysis of relationships and psychology seem a way off still -- we should cut Polak some slack here. Maybe she and her next protagonist will grow up next time or she will develop more distance between the two. New director, new film: yes; this may be promising. It holds the attention.

Hemel (Netherlands, Spain, k80 min.) debuted at Rotterdam and showed at the Berlinale. It opens in cinemas in the Netherlands March 29, 2012. It was screened for this review as part of the Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center New York series, New Directors/New Films, where it will show at these times and places:

Friday, March 23rd | 9 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th | 5 PM | MoMA

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