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More pricks than kicks for the lens of youth, as Beckett would say, and there's the "little bump of amativeness" in the provincial Dutch town. Overgrown boys and their wheels, leader of the pack (Hans van Tongeren) and Lothario mechanic (Toon Agterberg) and luckless schmo (Maarten Spanjer), not quite noticing the horizon beyond the dirt-bike racetrack. The champion racer (Rutger Hauer) stops by to be amused, meanwhile the hash-slinging siren (Renée Soutendijk) is determined to leave kitchen grease for fur coats. Phallic measurement contests, the mustard dip at the discotheque that becomes menstrual blood during a curtailed romp, the continuous performance of macho bluster. "Your huge croquette is of little use now, huh?" Paul Verhoeven has Saturday Night Fever in one hand and Breaking Away in the other, from his reserves of cruel wit emerges a most brutal I Vitelloni. In this ruthless jock opera, dreams are channeled into the roar of Hondas and fate shows its hand with a bag of orange peels carelessly hurled off a car. Paralyzed by an accident, the hotshot gets a taste of transcendence promptly undercut, the illumination of deliverance turns out to be a truck's headlights. The stud gloats over the gay blokes he's stomped until his own queer streak is forcibly excavated in the underground tunnel to Rotterdam, afterwards he can at last confront the patriarchal Bible-thumper. Mocked astride his motorcycle, the weenie nevertheless gets the trophy, a connection with the vivacious little businesswoman who understands how dog food figures in the metaphor of life. "Find out what's inside of it, and lose your appetite." The bitter distillate of testosterone zipping around in muddy circles, the elevated angle on the escape at the close merely reveals a bigger grid. With Marianne Boyer, Peter Tuinman, Hans Veerman, Saskia van Basten-Batenburg, Yvonne Valkenburg, Ab Abspoel, and Jeroen Krabbé.
--- Fernando F. Croce |