Movie: Fanfare (Bert Haanstra, 1958)
An absolute nothingburger of a movie I greatly enjoyed recently is 10 Years, released in 2011, about a bunch of recent college graduates going to their high school reunion. It contains a killer cast, including (but definitely not limited to) Oscar Isaac, Aubrey Plaza, Channing Tatum, Kate Mara, Rosario Dawson and Ron Livingston. Some of these people had just broken through or were about too, and this film shows why better than many of their superior movies. 10 Years only works because some of the most charismatic people alive talk wittily, flirtingly and interestingly about the challenges, problems and pleasures of contemporary college graduates. It's a highly entertaining, easily enjoyable idealisation of contemporary post-college graduate life, induliging in all the fantasies all students at some point have had about how glorious their life will be. Fanfare is sort of the same movie, but about the pittoresque small town life in the Netherlands of the 1950's. The Netherlands of the 1950's really liked hearing and seeing such stories about itself, and this became the most succesful Dutch movie of all time. Over 2,5 million people went to see it in the cinema, a record that has since only been surpassed by Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight (basically its polar opposite!) in 1973. I had never heard of it before and didn't much care for it, but it certainly has its charms, mostly thanks to the warm, loving characterisation of the village, and its people.
Fanfare is about two rival restaurant owners from the small village of Lagerwiede (a fictional town, in reality Giethoorn, one of the many Dutch cities to have been called the 'Dutch Venice') who bring their rivalry to the municipal brass band, forcing it to split in two. That's a huge problem as the mayor (stern, but caring for his citizens) has signed the band up for a local competition and each city can have only one entry. The city now has to decide whether it will represented by the boisterously jovial Geursen (Hans Kaart) or by the gravely serious Krijns (Bernard Droog). Geursen is the better musician and has more members in his band, but Krijns' crew has stolen and hidden the instruments. Hilarity is supposed to ensue as one party tries to bribe members to become the biggest brass band, while the other tries to retrieve the instruments.
Director Bert Haanstra is one of the filmmaking pioneers of post-war Holland, specialising in documentaries observing daily life in the Netherlands. He even has an Oscar and two additional nominations to show for it. The most curious element of Fanfare seems to be a consequence of this background. The film begins with an introduction to Lagerwiede by a presenter, who, similar to a talking head in a contemporary documentary, unobtrusively walks around the village, and among its citizens, making various observations about this community. The same thing happens at the end of the movie, but in between this man appears several times as a regular character in the film. Standing a bit apart from the main action, he gently calms down and offers valuable advice to the frenzied citizens crossing his path. He is introduced as a music expert, but beyond that he is also presented as a man of clearly superior sophistication and general intelligence, who also dresses better and pays more attention to his appearance and his disposition than the average citizen of Lagerwiede.
Unforutnately Haanstra's documentary interests don't do Fanfare's comic intentions much good. It plays as slapstick at half the speed. When things should get zippy, there are cuts to shots of ducks calmly floating along, farmers milking their cows, ordinary citizens walking along the canals, and endless rowing boats transporting musical instruments from one place of hiding to another. This approach reflects the leisurely life in the village, and presents a quite idyllic portrait of authentic Dutch rural life (several characters in the movie point out that they have returned from Amsterdam to the village), but it hinders the film from becoming truly funny. It did help Giethoorn become a very popular tourist destination, to the extent that it is currently an almost Disneyified version of an authentic Dutch town, massively bringing in Chinese tourists.
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