Word: assaults
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ASSAULT WAS THIS YEAR'S Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, and it's not hard to see why. It was no doubt less offensive to the sensibilities of the Academy than was its closest competitor, the sex-and-violence laden Betty Blue, yet it is a daring, disturbing, well-crafted film...
Based on Dutch author Harry Mulisch's novel, The Assault is the story of a Dutch man's coming to grips with history and his own past. As a 12-year-old boy in early 1945, Anton Steenwijk (Marc van Uchelen) lives under the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Haarlem. Despite the food and fuel shortages, the almost-defeated Nazis have a minimal effect on the lives of the Steenwijk family, who try to evade history by translating Homer, reading Spinoza, and playing board games...
Paradoxically, The Assault proves itself a daring film through the accuracy with which it follows Mulisch's novel. Mulisch's plot and dialogue are faithfully rendered, of course, but more surprisingly, so is his presentation. Like the book, the film is narrated in third-person by an anonymous, omniscient voice. The film is divided, like the book, into episodes marked by the year in which they take place...
...acting in The Assault is excellent. Van Uchelen gives the young Anton the right mixture of wide-eyed horror and stunned silence, while de Lint successfully portrays the gradual transformation wrought by the stifled memories of the adult Anton. Kraaykamp is incendiary as the embittered Takes, and van de Ven is surprisingly expressive for an actress who, as the prisoner, must recite her lines in a whisper, with most of her face in darkness...
Even though the film is two and a half hours long and spans forty years, The Assault is actually a short epic, concerned with the destiny of the post-war European soul. There is not a gratuitous scene or extraneous line of dialogue in it. Director Fons Rademakers is meticulous yet never plodding. The Assault is a film of obvious artifice, yet it is rarely didactic and always powerful...