The Power Of Character

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It is set in the early years of this century. It features an unreasonably implacable villain, a talented and idealistic young man determined to rise out of poverty, and a tender love story that ends on a poignant, not to say tragic note. And it was unaccountably named last year's Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sentiment a couple of weeks ago.

Best Foreign Picture, that is. Whereupon, to extend the analogy between Character and Titanic, as the director accepted his Oscar, his ego succumbed to an attack of St. Vitus' dance, causing some among us to avert embarrassed eyes. But it's worthwhile, in the case of Dutch director Mike van Diem, to refocus them on his work, which is a true epic--long, dark, complex, enigmatic and curiously riveting.

Character's protagonist, a young man named Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huet), lives in emotional country bordered on one side by Kafka, on the other by Dickens, or, if you insist on being literal, in dank, gloomy Rotterdam in the 1920s. He is the product of a one-night liaison between a chilly, brutal man named Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir) and his stony housekeeper (Betty Schuurman), sex that one suspects was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for both of them. He keeps asking her to marry him, she keeps refusing him, and he takes his frustration out on his son.

That's easy for him to do, for Dreverhaven is an all-powerful figure. He is a bailiff enriching himself by collecting everyone's bad debts, and his tentacles reach everywhere. He is never too busy, though, to keep a baleful eye on his son, eventually ensnaring the lad in debt and squeezing him mercilessly for the money.

The obsessiveness with which the old man pursues this perverse relationship, recounted in flashbacks after the son is arrested on suspicion of murdering him, is horrific. This is especially so since the lad is apparently everything his father is not--clean-cut, eager to please, lovable. But therein lies the story's cunning. For the father recognizes in his son qualities that they share. The son is wily, a demon for work, and not comfortable or clever with women, as he proves by sadly fumbling an office romance as he rises from clerk to partner in a law firm.

As the movie proceeds, taking time to linger with complex subsidiary characters, letting us absorb the detailed richness of its imagery, contextualizing its story in a broader social history (unlike most movies, it is aware of working-class unrest and Marxist attempts to organize it early in this century), two withering ironies are drawn. The first is that the father is one of those sad souls who can express love only by tormenting the object of his affection. The other is that his rationale for bad behavior--that he's building the boy's "character"--is not entirely wrong. In the end, Katadreuffe is strong, though at what cost in future psychiatric bills the movie wisely does not say. It is content to offer us only this bleak, useful thought: life's problems are not all small stuff, and we do need to sweat them. It helps us get rid of our baby fat.

--By Richard Schickel