The Assault (De Aanslag) from Dutch director Fons Rademakers won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1986. It opens in Holland near the end of World War II when the Nazi defeat was inevitable, but while the full force of Nazi brutality remained a potent threat. Holland was beset with collaborators, resistance fighters, and folks just trying to stay alive by staying as clear of all sides as possible. A single ghastly episode and its aftermath form the entire basis for the film.

The Story: In a quiet suburban neighborhood in Nazi-occupied Holland, four families live in close succession along a single street. The families all know one another and interact in various ways. A Nazi-collaborator named Ploeg, who has participated in torturing subversives, is suddenly shot to death by a pair of Dutch resistance fighters, Cor Takes (John Kraaykamp) and Truus Coster (Monique Van de Ven) on this usually tranquil street. The various residents peer out their windows, realizing all too well that the Nazis will retaliate viciously and that one family or another will likely be slaughtered. The man and his daughter who live in the house nearest the body quick move it down the street and leave it in front of a neighboring house, where the Steenwijks live.

The Steenwijks, a family of four (parents and two boys) had just sat down to begin a game of Parcheesi by candlelight (it was after curfew) when the commotion began. They quickly understand the implications of the body now being in front of their house and the older son hastens out, planning to move the body still further down the street. The Nazis arrive, however, just as he is standing over the body and he flees while shots ring out around him. The Nazis break into the Steenwijks’ home and the younger brother and his parents are herded outside and separated. Later, the parents are shot to death. The older son is also killed when he is found next door, holding a pistol on the pair that had moved the body. The younger boy is placed in jail for a night, in a cell with another prisoner, a young woman, later referred to by the police as a collaborator. She comforts and reassures the youthful Anton, speaking gently to him and telling him about the man that she loves. The cell is almost totally dark and Anton never sees the young woman’s face, except for her lips, as she quietly whispers to him. Later, Anton is released into his uncle’s care. The rest of the movie is the story of the subsequent life of that young boy, Anton Steenwijk, his postwar adjustments, his repressed memories and the stress they unleash, and his gradual discovery of additional details of what happened on the night his family was slaughtered

After the war, Anton returns to school, completes college, and becomes an anesthetist. He marries and has a daughter named Sandra. Later he divorces, remarries, and has a son named Peter, after his murdered brother. At various points in his life, Anton encounters others who recall the events of the night on which his family was killed. First, on a visit to his old neighborhood, he encounters a woman who lived next door – on the side opposite from the neighbors who moved the body. She fills in some details of what transpired – including some that Anton can hardly bear to hear. Later, Anton meets the son of the collaborator who was shot to death that night. He had been a classmate of Anton’s in school. He is now staunchly right-wing and anti-Communist – even as his father had been – defending his memory of his father by perpetuating his political views. Anton is surprised that the son views himself as the victim of the story (having lost his father that same night). Later, as the son of a collaborator, after the war, the boy’s opportunities in life had been severely limited.

On another occasion, Anton encounters the resistance fighter, now grown old, who killed Ploeg, setting off the chain of events that culminated in the deaths of Anton’s entire family. He realizes for the first time that the woman with whom he had briefly shared a cell was this man’s partner in the killings. Still later, Anton encounters the woman who had helped her now-deceased father move the body of Ploeg from in front of their own house to the front of the Steenwijks’ house. One question has plagued Anton, and he finally gets to pose it: why had they moved the body in front of his family’s house rather than in the other direction where the house belonged to a bigoted anti-Semitic man? I won’t tell you what her answer was, but it is a real shocker!

Themes: One theme of this film is the role of chance in destiny. The most frequent criticism levied against this film, in fact, is that it involves too many coincidental encounters between Anton and various other persons who were involved on that fateful night when Anton’s family was murdered. It is an unjust criticism because this film (as well as the book on which it was based) is modeled after classic Greek tragedy in which coincidence is used to convey the inevitability of fate. Stones serve as a linking metaphor in The Assault, exemplifying fate. At the moment that the events of that fateful night of the murders began to unfold, the Steenwijk family had just sat down to play Parcheesi together. Anton was about to roll a die to determine who would go first. At that very moment, the shots occurred outside. We see, for just a moment, Anton look at the die in his hand – it had come up one (perhaps suggesting there would be just one survivor). The Dutch word for dice is “dobbelsteen”, meaning a “dicing-stone,” so the stone motif is also related to dice, which are in turn a symbol of chance. Later, each time Anton runs into one of the people who had been involved in the episode on the night of his family’s murder, it is also associated with his encountering a stone. The son of the collaborator Ploeg, for example, is carrying a stone as part of a protest demonstration. He meets his first wife while visiting the Stone of Scones. He talks about the deadly night with Cor Takes, the resistance fighter, in front of a stone monument. Chance played a major role in Anton’s life and loss in several ways. It was involved in Anton surviving while all of the rest of his family was killed. Its influence was evident as well when Cor Takes states, “We could also have shot Ploeg in another neighborhood, but then I would be talking to someone else right now.”

A second theme is the issue of blame and responsibility. Anton has a very healthy attitude toward blame but, until the very end, an unhealthy one in relation to responsibility. When Dutch resistance fighters killed a vicious Nazi-collaborator and torturer and that act led to the retaliatory murders by the Nazis, who is to blame for those latter deaths? The Nazis certainly, but are the resistance fighters also culpable? Anton’s view of moral responsibility is the valid one: “Everyone has done what he has done and no one else.” The Nazis and not the resistance fighters are responsible for the deaths of his parents and brother. Perhaps the neighbors who moved the body as well. On the other hand, Anton’s psychological defense against the memory of the violence that was done to his family is to dissociate himself from all news events and political issues related to war or violence, in effect damning all sides alike and refusing all personal responsibility – except when he finally joins a “ban-the-bomb” rally at the very end.

A third theme of this film is the issue of psychological repression and its mental health implications. Traumatic experiences often have to be dealt with over and over again. We may feel that we’ve resolved an issue and come to grips with it, only to find that we’ve merely repressed additional feelings and that those emotions are beginning to gnaw away at our psyches. Many years after World War II, Anton finds himself fighting bouts of depression and panic. Anton accidentally discovers one of the best ways to relieve posttraumatic stress when he joins the bomb protest at the end of the film – sublimate the emotion into constructive action. Anton, with the encouragement of his daughter Sandra, also discovers that some relief can be derived by seeking closure on old wounds. Together, they visit the site of the Nazi headquarters where Anton had been held as a boy and later the grave of Truus Coster, the young woman with whom he had shared the cell. There, the words that she had spoken to him suddenly burst into his conscious mind – her message of love intended for Cor Takes. Anton tries to find Cor one last time, only to discover that the building in which he lived has been torn down and replaced by an office building. In a touch of irony, two identical vans pass by bearing the name of a company: Takes & Ploeg. Takes was the name of the fanatical resistance fighter and Ploeg was the collaborator, but their respective names are now linked in business in the new postwar Holland, symbolizing the healing of old wounds and the moving on into a new era.

Is this a film about the Rashômon-effect as one reviewer suggests? No, not really. The Rashômon-effect is about contradictory perspectives/memories of an event. Here, each principal in the horrible event that opens the film contributes additional details to the story because of their separate vantage points. The story becomes increasingly more complete, but the various vantage points mostly do not contradict one another.

Production Values: Derek de Lint, who plays the lead role in this film as the adult Anton, also appeared in Soldier of Orange (1977), 3 Men and a Baby (1987), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). It is a nicely understated performance. I also particularly liked the performance of John Kraaykamp as Cor Takes. The cinematography provided by Theo van de Sande was better than average. The intelligent themes of the film and the fine performances are its greatest strengths.

One weakness of this film, in my opinion, is that the only real plot is what occurs on that terrible night when the Nazis killed Anton’s family and burned their house to the ground. The entire rest of the film, which follows Anton’s rather mundane subsequent life, has no additional plot except that Anton periodically learns a new detail about what happened in the opening scene from another participant. Those piecemeal illuminations are spaced within an almost documentary-like collage of war-related and bomb-related protests in Holland over the ensuing decades. This collage makes the point that the threat of war is never ending and it stretches out the revelations about the traumatic night in Anton’s life, but otherwise adds nothing to the narrative. There is so little inherent continuity after the opening events, in fact, that scenes have to be strung together by a voice-over narration, further destroying all sense of an on-going story. What is engaging in this script is really just the quick, short opening, which is then echoed over the next forty years of Anton’s life and the last hour-and-a-half of the movie’s length.

The exposition of the psychological developments in Anton’s mind is rather weak as well. It’s not at all clear why his first marriage falls apart or why he begins to experience stress so many years after the traumatic episode. One psychological element that is handling skillfully, however, is the inference that his attraction to his first wife was subconsciously due to the resemblance of her lips to those of the female resistance fighter, Truus Coster, with whom he had spent the night in a jail cell as a little boy.

Bottom-Line: This is a film with a fascinating premise, great themes, strong performances, and some clever symbolism, but it is also a half-hour’s worth of plot stretched out for two hours. I recommend it (but not highly) for its themes, especially to those with an interest in World War II. This film has apparently been released on VHS in both dubbed and subtitled versions. The copy I purchased was dubbed. I would recommend trying to find the subtitled version instead. The version I own has a running time of 126 minutes, but a source book that I use indicates a length of 155 minutes, so I am guessing that a cut version may have been released in America. Also, I’ve seen one review that describes a scene that does not occur in the version I have. I’m not sure that this film would benefit by additional footage.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Netherlands:

Antonia’s Line
Character
Soldier of Orange
The Vanishing

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older