Film: Love Life
Year of production: 2009
UK Release date: 13th June 2011
Distributor: Yellow Knife
Certificate: 15
Running time: 113 mins
Director: Reinout Oerlemans
Starring: Carice van Houten, Anna Drijver, Barry Atsma, Eline Van der Velden, Pierre Bokma
Genre: Drama/Romance
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Netherlands
Language: Dutch
Review by: Calum Reed
Adapted from Ray Kluun’s novel, the original Dutch translation of “Love Life” is “A Woman Goes To The Doctor” - the first line of a joke used popularly in the Netherlands. It isn’t the most sensitive title for a story of a couple torn apart by cancer, but as an autobiographical work, Kluun remains best placed to tell it, and in chronicling his strained relationship with first wife Judith - from their first ever meeting, to her death from the disease just over ten years ago – he gained considerable acclaim, prompting a film adaptation that hit Dutch screens in November 2009.
The film hurtles fairly quickly through time, beginning with the couple, Stijn (Barry Atsma) and Carmen (Carice van Houten), in an extended honeymoon period, in which they are visibly devoted to each other and have a child, Luna. This somewhat idyllic setup is eventually shattered when Carmen finds a lump on her breast, and is promptly diagnosed as having an advanced stage of Cancer that means she must have a mastectomy in order to prevent further spread of the disease.
Despite the announcement that Carmen is officially free of illness, the couple struggle to come to terms with what has happened, and feel powerless to resolve their relationship as husband and wife. They grow apart, as she spends more time in New York and he buries himself in his healthy business and fiery lover Roos (Anna Drijver).
Once the couple are forced to confront their issues, they reach a surprising decision, but must again revise their outlook when Carmen’s health takes another turn for the worse…
Kluun certainly can’t have shied away from flaunting his own inability to remain monogamous, as Love Life offers a decidedly unsympathetic view of Stijn as a fickle follower of alcoholic spirits and one-night stands. While many would scale the moral high-horse to criticise his infidelity (pre or post-cancer), it’s asserted towards the start of Love Life that he and Carmen mutually accept that he will sleep with other women behind her back. Authorial embellishment on Kluun’s part seems unlikely, too, given that Carmen’s attitudes towards the issue don’t remain so free and easy. Stijn’s guilt is often examined through racy images, the most dramatic and misjudged of which occurs in a scene where he watches an attractive blonde girl strip at a club, only for her then to rip a breast off and seductively smother herself in blood. As an hallucinatory sequence, it does little to detract from the film’s aggressive attitude towards sexuality, or the apparentness of Stijn’s insatiable libido.
Together with incessantly trippy visuals of nightlife, Oerlemans offers ideas of escapism and a lack of faith as ironically more dangerous than cancer itself. While Love Life is expectedly quite episodic with regard to Stijn’s internal dilemnas over Roos, Carmen’s realisations of this, and her many medical dramas, it’s refreshingly brisk towards a proverbially-staged subject. The facetious way in which the couple tackle the cancer issue has its charm, as the underlying tense jolts of brazen humour provide a distracting temperance to the growing disconnection between them. The film is an unorthodox presentation of a topic many find difficult to discuss, and its predominant desire to shy away from being clean and sentimental as a production eventually works wonders. Even Carmen’s final moments, while weepy and somewhat conventional, aren’t handled with a great amount of ease or poignancy.
Euro cinema siren Carice van Houten builds upon her impressive showing in 2006’s Black Book with a subtly enlightening turn, while the relatively unknown Atsma revels in his bad-boy role, delving into Stijn’s perpetual commitment struggle with fearless dynamism. It’s to his credit that we’re able to see so far into the psyche of a man many will likely find detestable on the surface.
Love Life is often brutally honest as a disintegration of a relationship founded upon youth itself. Resignation and acceptance still dominate the characters in the film’s second half, but in a way that correlates with the impulsive nature of the couple as lustful, reckless, and undeniably for-the-moment. One senses that even had cancer not cruelly intervened, their story would likely still not have that elusive happy ending.
The refusal to bow to tradition has inevitably emerged from the honesty and authenticity of the source material, but Love Life still has to navigate the problems of being brash and matter-of-fact about the timidly-talked-about issue of cancer. Rather than capitalise and plug the disease, the film feels resentful of it, displaying some baldly insensitive scenes and finding a repetitive mode within its breathless dash through romance, tragedy, and finally romance again. It’s a film people may struggle to take to its heart, but one that deserves recognition; boldly straying away from the cinematic devices of weepy lifetime drama, and still managing to become a devastating, tragic love affair. CR
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