In the occupied Netherlands near the end of WWII, a young teenager, Jeroen Boman (Maarten Smit) is sent to the Dutch countryside to avoid the war in Amsterdam. While living with his adopted family, Jeroen meets and becomes friends with a Canadian soldier named Walt Cook, who is stationed at the same town he is staying at. Joroen and Walt spend a lot of time playing around and eventually a romantic relationship develops between them. The boy’s sexual curiosity leads him to have a sexual experience with Walt, an encounter that is shown with some vague detail but without actually showing any nudity, even though sexual intimacy between the two of them is implied. Overall, the movie handles this difficult subject with an elegant style and feeling, without having the adult-child relationship overwhelm the viewer and thus allowing the movie to be seen as just a wartime relationship between two people that marks an important time in a young boy’s life.
Directed by Roeland Kerbosch
Your score–
Not scoredImages
Cast
Maarten Smit
Jeroen Boman (young)
Jeroen Krabbé
Jeroen Boman (adult)
Andrew Kelley
Walt Cook
Freark Smink
Hait
Elsje de Wijn
Mem
Derk-Jan Kroon
Jan
Wiendelt Hooijer
Henk
Iris Misset
Bonden
Gineke de Jager
Elly
Tatum Dagelet
Gertie
Marie-José Kouwenhoven
Renske
Valerie Valentine
Laura
William Sutton
Chuck
Andrew Butling
Ventriloquist
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