The Assault

The crucial, titular event in the new Dutch film The Assault occurs on an ordinary evening in extraordinary times. It is January 1945 in an Amsterdam suburb. The Dutch know the Germans will lose the war, but they need to sit tight and weather the current famine until the occupation ends.

On this night, the Steewijk family goes through the customary routine of supping and rationing. Suddenly the sound of a bullet splits the night. A Nazi collaborator falls dead just outside, in front of a neighbor’s house, shot by the Resistance.

Incredibly, the neighbors rush out and drag the corpse a few feet away – so that is lies in front of the Steenwijks’ house. This simple act will result in the family’s destruction. When the Germans arrive, they make an example of the Steewijks by razing the house and executing the family.

Except, that is, for the youngest son, 12-year-old Anton, who survives and grows to adulthood – an adulthood haunted by the incidents of this single tragic night. We see how the adult Anton is drawn back to the location of the assault, and how he is physically drawn to women who resemble the barely glimpsed Resistance member (Monique van de Ven) with whom he briefly shared a jail cell during that long night.

Director Fons Rademakers, working from the novel by Harry Mulisch, draws Anton’s search as a kind of unconscious detective story. Anton does not know what he is looking for, and for most of his life he even seems unaware that he is looking at all, but the assault remains the dominating event of his existence. He gravitates to it until, in middle age, he stumbles on an explanation for it.

Rademakers’ taut, atmospheric 1945 sequence, which takes up the first 50 minutes or so, is so good it almost puts an unfair burden on the rest of the film. In fact, the adult Anton’s life is laid out in a series of static, utterly humorless, encounters.

There are moments when the film would go quite dry if it weren’t for the sustained charge of the early scenes, and the psychological riddle that springs from them. Aiding immensely are the actors who play Anton: Derek de Lint, as the adult, and (especially) Marc van Uchelen, as the child.

This sustains the movie through its 2 ½ hours, and leads it to an exceptionally powerful ending – an ending that Rademakers treats with just the right mix of emotion, absurdity, and distance.

The Assault was the closing night feature for the recent Seattle International Film Festival, and it copped the audience’s awards for Best Picture and Best Director of that festival.

I didn’t vote for it for either award, but it turns out that Cannon Films, the American distributor of the film, was so impressed by the awards that they will distribute the film in its original length, subtitled, rather than in the cut, dubbed version that had been planned. The film’s performance in a few cities will determine whether it will be cut for smaller markets. If that’s the case, I’ll gladly vote for The Assault.

First published in The Herald, September 20, 1986

It won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Rademakers and Monique van de Ven were favorites of the SIFF directors, and Dutch cinema got quite a boost in Seattle. The young actor, Marc van Uchelen, went on to act and direct, until committing suicide at age 42 in 2013.