Winter in Wartime
(Oorlogswinter) by the Dutch director Martin
Koolhoven is really less about either winter or wartime than it is
about boyhood and its end — about which the movie’s sentimentality
rather takes away, I find, from its potentially more interesting
and exciting tale of intrigue and danger, set in Holland during the
last winter of the Second World War. Growing up, hard as it
sometimes is to believe these days, happens to nearly everybody and
so is inherently less interesting than the exciting stuff that
happens only to the extraordinary among us. I think Mr. Koolhoven
gets things slightly backwards by concentrating, emotionally, a
little too much on the development of his hero, a Dutch boy of 15
or so called Michiel (Martijn Lakemeier), while allowing the more
exciting and suspenseful events accompanying the war’s sudden
intrusion into his family life and the suspenseful question of who
is loyal and who is collaborating with the Germans to languish a
bit. The gain in added pathos by making a story about love,
loyalty, and betrayal happen to an adolescent does not make up for
what is lost by turning away, to that extent, from the love,
loyalty, and betrayal themselves.
Michiel’s father (Raymond Thiry) is the mayor of their
little Dutch town and so is required to have regular dealings with
the occupying Germans, with whom his relations are apparently a
little too cordial for the taste of Uncle Ben (Yorick van
Wageningen) who has recently returned to live with the family after
working in a German labor camp. But when Michiel is caught playing
in the wreckage of an RAF bomber with his friend Theo (Jesse van
Driel), daddy’s influence gets him off with a warning. No one in
the family must know, therefore, when Dirk (Mees Peijnenburg),
Theo’s older brother, asks for Michiel’s help in hiding Jack (Jamie
Campbell Bower), one of the airmen who survived the bomber’s crash
and now needs to escape back to England. Suddenly, the boy has not
just adult but life-and-death responsibilities without knowing whom
to trust to save his own life and that of the fugitive.
Complications ensue. Michiel’s sister, a nurse, has to be
confided in because Jack is hurt and needs medical attention.
Immediately, she and Jack are attracted to each other. Then the
Germans find the body of one of their soldiers whom Jack had had to
shoot in order to make good his escape after bailing out of the
doomed plane. The occupation authorities assume that someone in the
village has knowledge of what has happened to the dead soldier, and
they take and threaten to execute three hostages unless further
information is forthcoming. Michiel’s father is one of the
hostages. Suddenly, Michiel realizes that he can save his father’s
life by giving up the allied airman — who is by now also his
sister’s lover — to the Germans. Will he or won’t he? Mr.
Koolhoven doesn’t flinch from making his hero confront this dilemma
head-on, but he does soften the impact of the boy’s decision by
twisting him away from the moral responsibility for its
consequences and confronting him instead with quite a different and
more easily resolved dilemma.
Being a sucker for a good story, I admire the skill in
plotting shown by Mr. Koolhoven as well as Mieke de Jong and Paul
Jan Nelissen, with whom he adapted the semi-autobiographical novel
by Jan Terlouw. I also liked the excitement of Jack’s attempt to
escape from the pursuing Germans back to the allied lines. But as I
am also interested in the moral problems raised by the better sort
of movies, I can’t help feeling just a bit disappointed that the
moral difficulties he and his characters face are got out of with
insufficient difficulty. In the final scene, the movie makes a
point of depositing Michiel back into an apparently untroubled
boyhood as if nothing had happened to change his life forever.
Still, it is an enjoyable and well-made movie and all the
performances, particularly that of Mr. Lakemeier in the principal
role, are very well done. Likewise, the bleak white landscapes of
the Dutch winter by director of photography Guido van Gennep are
wonderfully atmospheric.
