Word: uchelen
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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...
...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...
...indeed they are. By the time this night of terror is finished, there is only one survivor: the youngest son Anton (played with stunned bravery by Marc van Uchelen). Inevitably, these events constitute the shaping trauma of his life, and The Assault becomes for the most part a subtle anatomization of the curious manner in which Anton deals with...
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