Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Jan Decleir | ... | Dreverhaven | |
Fedja van Huêt | ... | Katadreuffe | |
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Betty Schuurman | ... | Joba |
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Tamar van den Dop | ... | Lorna Te George |
Victor Löw | ... | De Gankelaar | |
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Hans Kesting | ... | Jan Maan |
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Lou Landré | ... | Rentenstein |
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Bernard Droog | ... | Stroomkoning |
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Frans Vorstman | ... | Inspecteur de Bree |
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Fred Goessens | ... | Schuwagt |
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Jasper Gottlieb | ... | Jacob 6 jaar |
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Marius Gottlieb | ... | Jacob 6 jaar |
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Pavlik Jansen op de Haar | ... | Jacob 12 jaar |
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Marisa Van Eyle | ... | Jiffrouw Sibculo |
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Wim Van Der Grijn | ... | 2e Inspecteur |
In the 20's, in Netherlands, Jacob Willem Katadreuffe has just concluded the law school and has an argument with the High Court Enforcement Officer Dreverhaven at his office. Katadreuffe leaves the place covered in blood. On the next morning, he is arrested by the police for the murder of Dreverhaven. He claims that he is innocent and discloses the story of his life to the Chief of Police. His mother Joba was the maid at Dreverhaven. One night, she is raped by him and a couple of weeks later she learns that she is pregnant. Dreverhaven proposes to marry her but Joba quits her job and leaves his house. Along the years, Katadreuffe is bullied at school and called bastard by his mates and his mother never talks to him. One day, he is involved by other kids in a theft of bread and arrested by the police. When he calls his biological father to help him, Dreverhaven tells the police that he does not know who Katadreuffe is. The boy is intelligent and learns English reading a superseded and ... Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
In this film we are confronted with a perfect script if there ever was one! Once again, talented screenwriters have proved that a fine novel can be transformed into a great film, without losing any depth in philosophical understanding or psychological subtlety. In 'Character', the paired tension between pride and guilt, as well as between pride and love, or guilt and love, or love and power, gives birth to an astounding and magnificent lesson in human character and behavior. The fact that Mike van Diem and Laurens Geels, two of the film's three writers, were at the same time -respectively- its director and producer, plays no small role in the success of the script, since the novel by Bordewijk was read -and rewritten- from the perspective of cinema, and not the other way around. The psychological themes are treated as variations in a symphony, presented in one of the characters and later developed in another, or presented in one form and then transmuted into another, as the brilliant treatment given to the self-destructive tendencies in the Dreverhaven character, or the extreme laconism in the mother-son relationship. Seen at a tropical country as Ecuador (my own), surrounded by a teenage audience that was led to expect something else; an audience which was only very slowly won by the tense and restrained 'northern', 'iceberg' pace of the film, 'Character' transformed the screen into a gigantic and painful mirror filled with reflections of the sorrows and sufferings of human nature. And finally those teenagers stopped crunching chips and sipping sodas, and started thinking. A '10' by any standard.