_Borgman

In all of his films Alex van Warmerdam has served up a satisfying blend of dark humour, macabre plot twists, psycho/sociopathic character traits (many within characters played by himself), imagery both grotesque and painfully beautiful, and a tendency towards absurdism worthy of Buñuel in his pomp. Borgman, his eighth film, offers much of the same but is different in one respect. The film is a dark fable, with matters macabre and supernatural at its core, and this time around a deeper sense of seriousness is in evidence, horrific and psychologically disturbing, but nevertheless delivered with measure and restraint. Borgman is a film made by a director in control of his craft.

The film opens with a quotation - “And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks” - before we see a shotgun-wielding priest, played by Pierre Bokma, hunting down three men who live in a warren of their own making, beneath the forest floor. Their leader is the eponymous Camiel Borgman.

There is something of the night about Borgman, a man both deeply charismatic and other-worldly, who talks his way into the lives of an affluent middle-class couple, their three children and their nanny, all living comfortably on the forest’s fringes. When installed there, he begins to wreak murderous havoc, and calls upon his followers to aid him in this task.

Van Warmerdam’s screenplay was, he explains, a story told in the writing. “I was a little bit, vaguely interested in horror, in something nasty,” he says. “I tried to go to another part of my brain to see what was there, to find a starting point. I had no idea when I started writing in which direction it should go.”

The crucial starting point, he claims, was when the tramp-like Borgman turns up at the door of the house and claims that Marina, the matriarch, was once his nurse. “When I wrote that scene, for a long time that felt like really something. Maybe she was his nurse, maybe they had had a relationship, and so during the writing I found my way and I developed the story.”

What follows is a disturbing, uncanny and at times deeply lyrical tale of murder, abduction and diabolism. The film may eschew overt gore, but nevertheless the image of three murder victims, floating upside down in wavy green pond water, their heads cemented into equally-sized buckets, is both intriguing and disturbing. Equally memorable is the image of a naked, sprite-like Borgman who comes to Marina at night as an incubus, crouching over her, filling her dreams with terrors and monsters and violent sex. The opening scene in which the earth collapses into the matrix of tunnels built beneath the earth is spectacular.

The character of Borgman is played by Flemish actor Jan Bijvoet, whom van Warmerdam describes as Belgium’s “best kept secret”. Prior to the film, Bijvoet had turned his back on acting for two years, preferring to direct, feeling no compulsion therefore to self-groom either for stage or for screen. So first day on set he resembled a prophet; emaciated, with wild hair and a long beard. Then, half way through the film, when he formally applies for the job of house gardener (having creatively murdered the previous incumbent), his hair is newly cut and his face is clean-shaven. “The moment it all came off he looked like a totally different person,” points out van Warmerdam. “I was surprised what was underneath.”

Van Warmerdam himself appears as follower Ludwig, a no-nonsense homicidal fixer who performs surgical incisions in the backs of each of the children. Whether he is putting something in or taking something out is unclear. “That is the big question. I don’t know. Both answers are possible of course. Maybe the removal of an essence,” the director speculates.

Previous van Warmerdam films have a deeply rooted comic core - the two preceding films, Waiter and The Last Days of Emma Blank, are downright hilarious. But laughs are not in abundance this time around. Not that that was the director’s intention when writing the screenplay. “Eventually there was less humour in the film than in the script, but Job ter Burg is a very good editor, so we gave many viewings to one or two people, trying to find the film hidden in the material, and we took out a lot of information and a lot of humour, and made it more serious than it was on paper.

“It is a film about fallen angels, who need people to sustain them,” van Warmerdam concludes. “It is a real horror story, and even though I do not like the word, it is a little bit occult. Which is not at all my style - but it happened.”

Industry Boost

The Cannes selection is a boost to a Dutch funding infrastructure that has placed increasing emphasis on its arthouse output, and which has implored its producers to find international co-production partners to boost investment.

Over the past few years more and more Dutch films, mainly international co-productions, have been wooing and wowing selectors and juries at all the major international festivals, and (young) art house directors such as Nanouk Leopold, David Verbeek, Sacha Polak and Boudewijn Koole, to name just a few, are assuming heavyweight status on the festival circuit.

Borgman itself is a co-production with Flanders and Denmark, countries with whom The Netherlands has close co-production ties. A co-production bilateral treaty already exists between the Netherlands Film Fund and the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF) while a top-level summit has been arranged for Cannes 2013 to discuss continuing and augmenting Dutch/Danish collaboration in the future.