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REVIEWS The Netherlands

The Deflowering of Eva van End in competition at TIFF

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- Michiel ten Horn’s tragicomedy has the chance to win an important award at 12th Transylvania IFF

Shown in the main competition of the Transylvania International Film Festival (31 May - June 9), Michiel ten Horn’s The Deflowering of Eva van End [+see also:
trailer
interview: Michiel Ten Horn
film profile
]
has many chances to find itself among the winners announced next Saturday in spite of very strong competitors. Amusing, unpredictable and colourful, the tragi-comedy has already been bought for domestic release by local distributor Clorofilm.

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It’s hard to find a more dysfunctional family than the Ends. Their relationships seem to function just by ignoring large chunks of what the others say or do. Nobody listens to young Eva (Vivian Dierickx), for example, not even when she announces that the family must host Veit, an exchange student from Germany. Mother Etty (Jacqueline Blom) finds no joy in taking care of the others and makes efforts to find time for herself without knowing how to use it. From Manuel (Abe Dijkman), the rebellious younger son, the father Evert (Ton Kas) has only one expectation: to win a frikandele eating contest for the fourth time in a row. The elder son Erwin (Tomer Pawlicki) seems to be the happiest in the family, on the verge of moving with his girlfriend, but… nobody is safe near immaculate, vegetarian, charitable Veit (Rafael Gareisen).

All the Ends seem to live in their own private sphere, trying to revolve one around the others as much as possible without touching or interacting. Veit is the black hole who attracts, fascinates and annoys them in puzzling and disruptive ways, making all the five of them to (at least want to) reinvent themselves. Cooking breakfast, giving a massage, silently meditating, talking about birds or just being there becomes the equivalent of showing a red cloth to a bull and the effect on the Ends is quite funny, as long as one accepts the convention that the rather unremarkable Veit has this amazingly remarkable effect on the family’s members.

With touches of Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz’s dysfunctional families, the van Ends have so much to win from the amazing actors. Vivian Dierickx is top notch playing the almost autistic Eva, who goes practically unnoticed by those around her until she tries to find a voice. Anne Barnhoorn’s screenplay finds interesting and effective ways to develop the characters and the situations are sometimes so believable and the hiccups in the family’s relationships so convincing that the audience will have to remember similar events in their past. At the end, the message is quite uplifting: a family crisis (here caused by Veit’s psychological bomb) can be the ground for a better life together.  

Michiel ten Horn’s film is one of the ten first features (out of 12 entries) in the Transylvania International Film Festival competition, which focuses only on first or second features. The film has competitors from four continents, with European films such as Tomasz Wasilewski’s In a Bedroom [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
, Iveta Grofova’s Made in Ash [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iveta Grófóva
interview: Jiří Konečný
film profile
]
, Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tobias Lindholm
film profile
]
and Mikael Marcimain’s Call Girl [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
among them.

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