Dusk (Schemer) (3/10)

January 19th, 2012

I really shouldn’t generalise, I know, but hand on heart I must admit to not enjoying Dutch movies at all. I’ve seen quite a few in the last four or five years, and none have impressed. Take Tirza, for example, of which I remarked ‘this is Dutch cinema at a low ebb’. Tirza actually beat Dusk for the nomination as The Netherlands’ best film of 2010. From low ebb to bottom of the barrel.

Six teens, three boys, three girls. Four are coupled up, the odd boy out is a repressed gay who fancies one of the other boys, and the sixth one, Jessie, was murdered by the other five. The reason she was murdered is the story of Dusk which, apparently, is based on the true-life story of 16-year old Maja Bradaric who was killed by her friends in 2003. I’m afraid I’m in no position to confirm or deny this movie’s authenticity but, from skimming some translated pages, it is probably fair to say that this was inspired by, as opposed to a fictualisation of, the young Bosnian immigrant.

The movie makes it clear pretty much from the off that Jessie (Gaite Jansen) is to be offed and that her friends were the ones doing the offing. Our first scene has them enlisted to help look for the body, a body whose whereabouts they know full well but cannot reveal. The movie then goes back to a time when the six hung out together, and tells the story from each character’s perspective. Scenes are therefore repeated, once from one person’s viewpoint, another time from another’s, and so forth. This isn’t a whodunnit – they all contributed to her demise – but rather a whydidtheydoit.

The answer lies in Jessie’s ability to get under the other teens’ skins. She appeared extrovert and confident, but that was just a teenage sham. Inside, she was full of the usual self-doubts we all went through at one stage or another. Her problem was that she built up such an exterior that, in truth, she wasn’t that pleasant to be around. One moment a flirt, the next a clam, a confidante and a betrayer, she managed to rub up all five of her ‘friends’ the wrong way. Ordinarily this would result in little more than a withering retort or a touch of the cold shoulders, but then ordinarily you wouldn’t run into five teens quite as horrid as the ones brought to us here.

It’s amazing these guys ever became friends at all. They barely spoke a civil word to each other in Dusk until it came to plotting Jessie’s demise. A casual ‘how would you kill her?’ question, posed by the group’s alpha male (appropriately named Caesar) sets the group off into a fantasy frenzy of suggested actions. I know kids – heck, I used to go to school with ‘em – and these didn’t feel like kids to me. They felt like broad brushstrokes, someone (the movie’s writer Anjet Daanje, presumably) shoehorning ideas into mouths that aren’t equipped to utter them.

You’ve got to have a pretty good reason, as Tarantino’s Jackie Brown had, to repeat the same scenes over and over. In fairness, Dusk has one. Jessie, viewed from behind, storms off in what appears to be an act of defiance early in the film. The same scene, only this time with the camera facing her, shows that she’s actually crying. That’s about it, though. The dull, vapid and vacuous kids don’t deserve any of the screen time director Hanro Smitsman generously gives them, and watching them repeat the same inanities over and over is sleep-inducing.