Word: krabbe
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Sometimes menacing, often bleakly comic, always alarmingly precognitive, the visions of Writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) have their cinematic possibilities. The trouble is his movie is mostly banal, the stuff of arrested adolescence. It contains obsessively recurring images: woman as spider, devouring her mate once she has lured him to sexual consummation; woman as elusive Madonna, offering salvation to wayward boys if only they can catch her attention; campy sacrilege committed on Catholic iconography gloomy reflections on the artist's unhappy lot in a staid bourgeois society, with particular reference to Holland, where the audience is uneconomically small...
Buoyed by some stylish exoticism, by Krabbé's ferocious performance as its bedeviled protagonist (a less-gay gay the movies have never offered) and by the mysteriously growing repute of Director Paul Verhoeven (he was responsible for the stodgy Soldier of Orange and the ugly Spelters), The 4th Man is bobbing prosperously along the art circuit, a midsummer night's titillation for the would-be with-its. But the movie's ultimate fate, surely, is to be celebrated, along with Pink Flamingos and its ilk, at the midnight masses of the lavender thrill...
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