a significant work of art

Rating: 10/10 (8 July 2010)

The extraordinary composition of frames serves to create a visual basis for a terse, complex narrative. The visual composition of each scene conveys what the verbal content alone would not. The acting ensemble was of the highest imaginable caliber. There emerges a third dimension in this art work which is seldom achieved in just 'motion picture'. Moralizing based on this work is really irrelevant. Expectations of linear, tidy narrative would not be met. The ambiguity which seems to pervade the core of the story is itself an aesthetic device necessary to the purposes of the maker of this work. Hanneke seems to have been developing and perfecting his skill in telling a story by thinking about his work as a painter of successive pictures connected by a common meaning.