Synopsis
The story of a farmer, Helmer, who realizes that his life has been influenced to an unhealthy extent by his aging father.
It's All So Quiet
2013 ‘Boven is Het Stil’ Directed by Nanouk Leopold
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A charming little chamber piece about a man caring for his increasingly disempowered father; no great revelations, but the central relationship feels genuine, and when it goes for visual poetry I liked it very much.
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The fact that I got to see It's All so Quiet after five years of waiting makes me feel like my Amazon Prime subscription is finally worth something.
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The late Dutch actor Jeroen Willems, who died in late 2012 at age 50, gives a superbly nuanced performance as Helmer, a middle age, single man taking care of his aging and infirm elderly father while singlehandedly managing his small dairy farm. The film is a slow paced, closely observed story of an emotionally blocked man who is in the process of gradually coming out of a shell made up of sexual denial and a profound sense of duty above desire. However, all of this is conveyed to the viewer with subtle (and finally not so subtle) cues which exist mostly in subtext. This isn't an easy film to like; but if one is sensitive to its simple message, it is a beautiful, earthy, revealing, humanistic story.
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Finally, a movie that combines all of the things that used to terrify me as an 8 year-old but are now the source of all my élan as a 22 year-old:
- The "Death and Dying" section of Chicken Soup for the Soul
- Gay tension
- Quiet rural living -
Review from Next Projection
It’s not solely for stylistic reasons that It’s All So Quiet tips its hat toward the western work of John Ford in one striking shot of its middle-aged farmer protagonist emerging from his barn, framed in silhouette in the vast doorway. The agrarian narrative of this new film by Nanouk Leopold plays like a distinctly European take on the American west, a farm-as-frontier reimagining of the masculine mythos of that genre in a twenty-first century context. But if there’s a real comparison to be made here it’s to Pilgrim Hill, the recent Irish movie that told the same tale of a son saddled with the responsibility of his father’s farm, caught between the old world of…
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Jeroen Willems is good, but it all felt a little too empty and minimalistic for me to connect with
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Beautiful small film about a farmer taking care of his ageing father and struggling with his repressed homosexuality. Not much is said, and what they say is sometimes hard to understand, but a lot can be read from the great acting, especially by Jeroen Willems.
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The work of the Dutch director Nanouk Leopold isn't know here at all. Perhaps that's because the films she makes are not only uncommercial but also uncompromising. "It's all so quiet", which she made in 2013, is, for the most part, a depressingly grim study of lonliness and sexual repression as well as of old age and family relations, in this case between a father and son. Helmer is a farmer living with, and caring for, his old and infirm father. There doesn't appear to be much love or affection between them; it's as if Helmer can't wait for his father to die.
Nothing much happens. Much of the time we simply watch Helmer go about his daily routine, at…
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A story stripped to the bone leaving the camera alone to capture Helmer’s situation, his isolation and his loneliness. The late Jeroen Willems certainly had a face worthy of focus. I still could have used more story.
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frankly could have done with some more words. but expressive. see the mans closed life, opening for even without his own efforts.