Successful war movies almost always depend on tone. We've seen so many battle films, so many soldiers and so many tanks, so many landings and invasions and spies dropped behind the lines that the actual subject matter itself is no longer enough for us. Movies like A BRIDGE TOO FAR may cost untold millions and be years in the making, but for the most part we're just not moved. Good war movies don't necessarily need a message, but they need a feeling: We want to sense what the war experience was like for a specific group of people at a particular time. Thi movie creates that feeling as effectively, probably, as it can be created. It traces the stories of six Dutch soldiers through the years before and during World War II, and at the movie's end we feel we know these people and have learned from their experiences.
Although the film contains a great deal of suspense and a fair amount of violence, it's not a garish adventure movie, it's a human chronicle. And it involves us. That's all the more remarkable because this isn't a profoundly serious little film with a somber message, but a big, colorful, expensive war movie-the most costly production in Dutch film history. Expensive war movies tend to linger forever on their great special effects; they have a tendency to pose their heroes in front of collapsing buildings and expect us to be moved. SOLDIER OF ORANGE is big, but it's low-key. It's about how characters of ordinary human dimension might behave against the bewildering scale of a war.
The movie's based on the memoirs of Erik Hazelhoff, a Dutch war hero who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe, landed in England, was attached to the then hopelessly disorganized and ineffectual Dutch government in exile, and spent the war on a series of espionage missions before finally joining up with the Royal Air Force and flying many missions. What's interesting is that the Hazelhoff character is shown doing all of these things, and yet he doesn't emerge as a superhero; he's just a capable, brave man doing the next right thing. The film mostly follows Hazelhoff, but it begins in the pre-war years with six friends-college students, playing tennis, hanging out together, doubting war will really come-and it follows all six through the war. Four of them die, one in a particularly horrible way in a concentration camp.
By following all six lives over a period of years, the film suggests the historical sweep of the war for many millions of lives; SOLDIER OF ORANGE isn't just episodes strung together (although it is episodic), but a suggestion of how long the war must have seemed, and how easily it must have seemed endless. The narrative structure is interesting. Instead of giving us a tightly knit plot, with characters assigned to particular roles and functions, it gives us a great many specific details. There are the scenes involving Queen Wilhelmina, for example. In exile in England, the dowager queen walks stiffly in her garden, gravely absorbs the advice of her ministers, receives delegations, and conveys a dignity upon the situation through her very bearing (for, of course, she had no real authority then at all). A subplot involving an underground Dutch radio operator is clothed in similar detail; we know enough of his character to know why he turns informer and his decision is not simply cowardly, but is almost understandable. Unforgivable, but understandable. The movie is filled with perceptions like that.
Although the film contains a great deal of suspense and a fair amount of violence, it's not a garish adventure movie, it's a human chronicle. And it involves us. That's all the more remarkable because this isn't a profoundly serious little film with a somber message, but a big, colorful, expensive war movie-the most costly production in Dutch film history. Expensive war movies tend to linger forever on their great special effects; they have a tendency to pose their heroes in front of collapsing buildings and expect us to be moved. SOLDIER OF ORANGE is big, but it's low-key. It's about how characters of ordinary human dimension might behave against the bewildering scale of a war.
The movie's based on the memoirs of Erik Hazelhoff, a Dutch war hero who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe, landed in England, was attached to the then hopelessly disorganized and ineffectual Dutch government in exile, and spent the war on a series of espionage missions before finally joining up with the Royal Air Force and flying many missions. What's interesting is that the Hazelhoff character is shown doing all of these things, and yet he doesn't emerge as a superhero; he's just a capable, brave man doing the next right thing. The film mostly follows Hazelhoff, but it begins in the pre-war years with six friends-college students, playing tennis, hanging out together, doubting war will really come-and it follows all six through the war. Four of them die, one in a particularly horrible way in a concentration camp.
By following all six lives over a period of years, the film suggests the historical sweep of the war for many millions of lives; SOLDIER OF ORANGE isn't just episodes strung together (although it is episodic), but a suggestion of how long the war must have seemed, and how easily it must have seemed endless. The narrative structure is interesting. Instead of giving us a tightly knit plot, with characters assigned to particular roles and functions, it gives us a great many specific details. There are the scenes involving Queen Wilhelmina, for example. In exile in England, the dowager queen walks stiffly in her garden, gravely absorbs the advice of her ministers, receives delegations, and conveys a dignity upon the situation through her very bearing (for, of course, she had no real authority then at all). A subplot involving an underground Dutch radio operator is clothed in similar detail; we know enough of his character to know why he turns informer and his decision is not simply cowardly, but is almost understandable. Unforgivable, but understandable. The movie is filled with perceptions like that.