Stars: Maarten Smit, Andrew Kelley, Jeroen Krabbé Writers: Don Bloch, Rudi van Dantzig (novel) A difficult subject handled with style and feeling.įantastic film.Shows EXACTLY what boys of that age go through,the feelings of puberty.All boys feel some kind of feeling for someone of the same sex at that age,even if they are not prepared to admit it.This film dealt with this issue like it is.It showed how some boys never forget their first feeling of “love” and some move on.The boy in the film never forgot his and lived with it all his life.It is an outrage that Walt,the object of the young boys feelings in the film,was seen as some kind of “peado”.He never encouraged the relationship as the boy,Jerome, later admits in the book he wrote many years later on which the film is based.This film had all the right emotions for that soldier away from home in a strange land meeting the boy going through puberty.A lovely,lovely film and very well acted and directed. Set in the Netherlands near the end of WWII, the film is a flashback recalling an adolescent relationship between Jeroen and a Canadian soldier. The story of a romantic relationship between a grown-up and a child. The book ends without any satisfying denouement - it was simply a chapter in a life, and life carried on from there, differently than before.Voor een verloren soldaat (original title)ġh 32min | Drama, Romance, War | (Netherlands) If you are looking for a neat and tidy story arc with a moral lesson and all loose ends tied up with a bow, you won't get it here. It is neither an indictment of nor an apologia for CSA. It's a memoir of boyhood, of abuse, of awakening. This book just feels so incredibly honest.
Jeroen's return to home in Amsterdam with his parents is anticlimactic and again, his feelings are all a mess. He both fears and longs for more, and thinks himself in love with Walt. His thoughts and feelings are conflicted and messy and changing in a way that feels very honest.
The scenes of coerced sex are not particularly explicit but are emotionally vivid, describing his dissociation in the moment, and the aftermath as he tries to process what he's experienced. The abuse overshadows, mixes up, and then ultimately comes to represent his natural adolescent sexual awakening. The alienation culminates in the wake of the sexual abuse Jeroen experiences at the hand of Walt, a Canadian soldier. From what I understand this was a semi-autobiographical work and it definitely shows.Ī sense of alienation builds throughout the book, from the first page where he's being shuttled off in the night to shelter with a rural family, his culture shock in the small town. A fascinating and very personal book, viewing the war and foreign occupations in the Netherlands through the only half-comprehending eyes of a boy.
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