by Allan Fish
(Netherlands 1958 86m) not on DVD
13 against 12
p Rudolf Meyer d Bert Haanstra story Jan Blokker, Bert Haanstra ph Eduard van der Enden ed Ralph Sheldon, Bert Haanstraa m Jan Mul art Nico van Baarle cos Hanka Roeloffsen
Hans Kaart (Geursen), Bernard Droog (Krijns), Ineke Brinkman (Marije), Wim van den Heuwel (Douwe), Andrea Domberg (Lies), Albert Mol (Schalm), Ton Lutz (Altena), Herbert Joeks (Koendering), Henk van Buuren (Valentijn), Johan Valk (Van Ogten), Jan Mol (Hulpje van Geursen),
When The Ladykillers finally issued in the end of the Ealing comedy cycle in the mid-fifties and British film comedy turned to the Boultiing brothers’ satires and the Carry On farces, it was always likely that their flag would be taken up elsewhere. Most obviously their influence can be seen in the whimsical comedies of the Czech new wave – imagine the various comic masterpieces of Vojtech Jasny, Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel had Michael Balcon’s celebrated cottage film studios not been there before. Owing more to Ealing than any of those Bohemian classics, however, was a film from the Netherlands by a director of documentaries, Bert Haanstra, making his first fictional feature.
Take a small village, Lagerwiede, in the Dutch marshes, where life goes on as it has always done, at a glacial pace. The one thing their mayor is proud of is their village brass band, who he believes has a chance in the regional concert finals. A spanner is thrown into the works by the endless feud between local café owners Geursen and Krijns. Geursen always succeeds in putting off Krijns during his French horn solo and laughs when he hits a wrong note, causing Krijns to try and throttle Geursen with his bombardon. The feud remains an irritant but finally blows up when Geursen visits Krijns’ pier-end establishment only for Geursen’s cow Clara to get loose and wreck the place. Krijns decides that enough is enough and not only withdraws from the band but incites a mutiny to create a rival band. The mayor tries to bring them back together by warning them the biggest band will get the financial grant, but instead it only leads to more subterfuge, sabotage, threats, bribery and blackmail.
The plot in itself isn’t what keeps the thing moving but the detail. It opens in typically leisurely fashion with a young girl playing a French horn under a haystack as cows go back and forth through a field as if on a conveyor belt. We know there’s a logical explanation and, sure enough, we see the cows are on canal barges passing each other up the narrow waterways. We then are introduced to a sort of narrator cum Chorus figure, a composer, who discusses the locale in the manner of Thornton Wilder’s Mr Morgan in Our Town (with also, not coincidentally, a nod to Mervyn Johns’ similar role in Ealing drama Went the Day Well?). As it turns out, however, one could argue that the narrator isn’t so much the composer, Altena, but the ducks on the village canals.
The ducks act as a sort of Dutch chorus and well as providing an illustration of the various silly goings on. When Geursen and Krijns are beginning their feud, the ducks are seen fighting over a crust of bread, when Krijns is hiding the band instruments from the law (reminiscent of the bottle hiding in Whisky Galore) the ducks are going bottoms up in the water, while in other scenes they merely quack as if in laughter. If we’re being critical one could call it obvious, yet it never somehow seems forced; everything is paced in such a way as to cause no offence, and if some of the humour is signposted – a man on a punt is so distracted by the derrière of a girl camper in shorts that he crashes into a jetty and destroys the milk churns of a neighbour – again we don’t care. Fanfare is not only a successful local comedy but a hymn to the Dutch countryside and a way of life – in much the same way as many of Haanstra’s documentaries looked at life passing by. It’s a film that would better known if it were made elsewhere, as well known as a film made thirty years later by its assistant director, George Sluizer. Now imagine there was a serial killer in Lagerwiede…
