CiNEMERCATOR - Alex van Warmerdam De Noorderlingen 1992
Filmlover,
4 cinephiles:
Merthe Voorhoeve, Andreas van Riet,
Maaike Hasselaar & Elisabeth van Vliet,
each are programming 1 precious film per month. That's 4 precious films per month!
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CiNEMERCATOR
doors open 19:30
start 20:00
ticket 3 Euro
nxt edition:
8-10
'De n**** heeft over het algemeen een erg goed gevoel voor humor.'
Alex van Warmerdam’s De Noorderlingen is a comedy for those who no longer believe that comedy should be about laughter. It’s set in a newly built Dutch suburb of the early 1960s, where everything is raw brick and scrub grass. The characters; a priest, a tax inspector, a boy with too much imagination, wander around like insects trapped under a glass. The neighborhood is supposed to represent progress, but it feels more like a laboratory in which van Warmerdam conducts his experiments on human vanity.
The genius of the film lies in its tonal cruelty: the jokes land without punchlines, the pathos is drained of sentiment, and everything looks slightly absurd without ever tipping into caricature. Van Warmerdam directs his actors with a painter’s precision, no one blinks without reason. The result is that every line and gesture feels both ordinary and quietly deranged.
If the Dutch postwar dream was to banish chaos with order, De Noorderlingen suggests the dream succeeded only in creating better conditions for madness. The priest becomes a porn peddler, the housewives drift into despair or violence, and the boy’s fantasy life is more coherent than the lives of the adults around him. It’s all terribly bleak, but also terribly funny- provided you accept that laughter here is a dry cough at the back of the throat.
De Noorderlingen is not a film that wants to be loved. It wants to be stared at, nervously, until you realize that this absurd little neighborhood looks alarmingly like the one you live in.
This film is chosen by Merthe.
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