My first day at Tofifest started with a first film: Instinct (2019) by Halina Reijn. She is an experienced actress in the theatre as well as in cinema and has worked with directors such as Paul Verhoeven, Alex van Warmerdam and Peter Greenaway. It is the first film co-produced by Man up. The company Reijn created together with Carice van Houten. The latter also plays the lead, Nicoline, who is a psychologist who works in the prison system dealing with sexually aggressive men.

In her current job, she is confronted with Idris (Marwan Kenzari), who is a rapist and one of the most dangerous patients at the institution. Initially, she is highly sceptical of him and is the only one in the group that challenges the idea of granting probation. Well aware of the horrendous crimes Idris committed, she gradually becomes attracted to him, and a kind of power play will ensue.

Nicoline is a restless person. She changes workplaces frequently, and in an early scene, we see her refusing an offer of indefinite duration, opting instead for a temporary position. Her apartment is so impersonal that I actually mistook it for a hotel room the first time it was shown. It seems that she has been waiting for something to shake up her existence.

The film is written by Reijn together with Esther Gerritsen. The purpose of the Man Up production company is “to create films and television drama with high current value and relevance told from a female perspective. To explore darker, edgy stories that, through shame or fear, often remain untold. Quality, artistic integrity and openness to their audiences define the productions.”

It’s a bold statement and, in my mind, a very welcome one. The story reaches dark corners and is not afraid to be complex without overt explanations. Those looking for a third act that wraps things up neatly will be disappointed. If you, on the other hand, are open to a film that probes the psyche in a way that few other films do, this might be the thing.

The acting is uniformly excellent. It’s hard to see that the film would work as well as it does with anyone else than Carice van Houten. Throwing terms like vulnerable and confident around would only scratch the surface of what Reijn and van Houten achieve here. During the opening of The Netherlands Film Festival, the director cheekily said that she paid van Houten in kind. They are, of course, immensely aided by the cinematography by Jasper Wolf, who also lensed Monos this year. The score by Ella van der Woude also deserves mentioning.

The first scene shows Nicoline taking part in an exercise playing a violent inmate who is supposed to be handled by some policemen. The scene doesn’t merely work as a presage of the role-playing between her and Idris, but it ends interestingly. The policemen didn’t frisk Nicoline thoroughly enough, and she shows them the cigarette lighter that they failed to find on her person. Whether it means they were just lazy or it is men being afraid of going too far is an open question. In any case, the film is eminently rewarding for anyone who is game.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe (2019) was a disappointment to me the first time around. The namesake flower didn’t bring me that much happiness. Now I went for a second inhalation to see if the scent of Little Joe would feel different. In some ways, it did. There is still some stilted dialogue, notably by two characters, and I’m still not sure how profound the probing of the concepts actually is, but as a piece of cinema, I appreciated it more this time. The cinematography and the score seemed less discordant, or maybe I was just in a better mood. I still hope that Hausner will return to make films in German.

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

The River (Ozen 2018) by Emir Baigazin was the first film I saw by the director. It’s a film about a Kazakh family with five sons who live on a farm in a remote village. We follow their everyday life working on the farm, where the oldest brother Aslan carries out the orders of the father, who is away for most of the time. Everything is planned and quite hierarchic.

Suddenly an unknown cousin, Kanat, appears unexpectedly. He arrives equipped with a tablet and other modern gadgets, and the brothers are introduced to a new world. Obviously, the newcomer brings temptations that threaten to ruin the family structure as it was. Then Kanat disappears during a visit to the titular river. Are any of the brothers responsible?

The film that came to my mind was Arturo Ripstein’s The castle of purity (El Castillo de la Pureza 1973). A film that I suspect has influenced another director that is not my Favourite, but that I guess some people might refer to when talking about this film, even though we don’t see any lobster in the river.

The film looks quite different to Ripstein’s. There is an austere rigour to the splendid images that sometimes verges on arthouse clichés but are just on the right side of becoming stilted. There is not so much concentration on narrative, but the musical approach to rhythm is perfect. The headline shouldn’t be read as a position taken by the director but rather a feeling I had while watching. The film itself is far less assertive. It makes me want to seek out Baigazin’s previous two films.

The Sweet Taste of Tofifest

My impressions of the festival after the first day were quite positive. The films were well chosen, and the atmosphere at the festival was relaxed. More reports will follow.