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THE
FOURTH MAN
7/10
(De
Vierde Man)
Holland
1983
dir Paul Verhoeven
103 mins
Verhoeven’s
last picture before he upped sticks to Hollywood is a real one-off: a
wild, overcooked, heavily symbolic riff on Catholicism, creativity and
premonition, a Dutch Don’t Look Now played for giddy, gaudy laughs.
Jeroen Krabbe is Gerard Reve (he shares his name with the author of the
novel on which the movie’s based) a heavy-jowled, alcoholic novelist living
in Amsterdam with his feckless, violin-playing boyfriend. The opening
scene sees Gerard stirring to life after what we presume was an almighty
bender, fantasising about strangling his lover with a black bra - we’re
immediately warned that what we’re seeing shouldn’t necessarily be taken
too literally, that we’re being made privy to Gerard’s processes of artistic
composition.
The
weird plot kicks off when Gerard is invited to the coastal town of Flushing
to give a talk to a literary society. On the way, he cruises a muscular
young man at the railway station. Arriving, he’s intrigued and unnerved
by Christine, the Hitchcockian blonde treasurer of the society who films
him with a super 8 movie camera. She invites him back to her place, a
flat over the beauty salon she runs, and suggests he moves in. Initially
reluctant, he changes his tune after realising Christine is seeing the
young stud from the railway station, and inveigles her into inviting him
for a visit. His plan works, but then finds out Christine has been married
three times, and that each of the husbands died in mysterious, violent
circumstances - who will be the fourth man?
It’s
a convoluted, extremely unlikely story, but Verhoeven keeps the audience
gripped by going way over the top whenever the situation allows: bold
colours, eye-popping fantasy sequences, a freewheeling atmosphere of dread
and premonition, aided by Jan (Twister) de Bont’s restless camerawork.
We’re never sure whether what we’re seeing is real or just the fruit of
Gerard’s fevered imagination: everything seems to have a deeper meaning,
everything is there for a purpose, fitting into a complex puzzle
that points inexorably towards death. The Fourth Man is close kin
to John Huston’s Wise Blood and the writings of Flannery O’Connor
on which that movie was based: the results of sincere, though idiosyncratic,
religious beliefs that seem baroque or fantastical to modern secular eyes.
It isn’t giving away anything of the story to say that the Virgin Mary
herself is an active, if peripheral, participant.
But
the religious elements never detract from the prevailing Daughters
of Darkness-ish tone of sinister jokiness. The home-movie footage
of Christine’s husbands is borderline screwball - one of them ends up
devoured by safari park lions. And Hermann’s fate, while shockingly violent,
is also hilariously excessive, the result of some of the most dangerous
driving ever committed to celluloid - though Christine is, if anything,
even worse behind the wheel. The ending’s a bit of a fizzle, but who cares?
There are enough startling, thought-provoking things going on here to
fill half a dozen ordinary pictures.
For an interview
with the director Paul Verhoeven click here
by Neil
Young
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