Antonia’s Line is a creatively distinctive though sometimes quirky film from the Netherlands and the winner of the 1995 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It also won the Most Popular Film Award at the Toronto Film Festival in 1995. It was directed by Dutch film-maker, Marleen Gorris, as her fourth feature-length movie. Gorris is known as a more than typically strident feminist and is unabashed about using her films as vehicles for expressing her feminist ideals. Her breakout movie, for example, A Question of Silence (1984), concerned three women of Amsterdam all fed up with men in general who taunt, then attack, and finally beat to death a store clerk who had accused one of them of shoplifting. Despite Gorris’ agenda, Antonia’s Line is a largely successful movie taken on its own terms and without undue hand-wringing.

The Story: The film begins around 1995, about the time it was produced, with an elderly Antonia having decided that this day would be a good one to die. The story then unfolds as an extensive flashback, as she surveys her long life. It is a story about five generations of women -- Antonia’s mother, Antonia herself (Willeke Van Ammelrooy), daughter Danielle (Els Dottermans), granddaughter Therese (Veerle van Overloop), and great-granddaughter Sarah (Thyrza Ravelsteijn). Antonia’s contemplation of her own death, initially transports her in her reverie back to the time of her mother’s death, 50 years earlier, in post-World War II Netherlands, shortly after liberation.

Antonia has returned to her village of birth with her teenage daughter, Danielle, because her mother is dying – to be there for her as she dies, then for the funeral, and to assume responsibility for the family farm that she will inherit. Danielle surveys the town that she will now be living in and is somewhat nonplussed. Signs hang all around, declaring “Welcome to our liberators!”, meaning, of course, the allied troops, though, as it happens, it could just as correctly be understood as the liberation of the town that will soon be engineered by Antonia or as the liberation of women so dear to Gorris’ heart. What follows from this point is more a series of vignettes or character studies than an actual plot.

Characters: The main appeal of this film lies in the richness of its themes and characters. First the characters. Antonia herself is not at all the typical Hollywood slender beauty. She is a sturdy, robust European type, almost statuesque in build. Her face is unusually attractive for a middle-aged woman, with a warm smile and open demeanor. She exudes self-assurance and competence. No reference is ever made in the film to her daughter’s father. He is clearly irrelevant (if he ever even existed).

We soon meet Antonia’s mother, close to death, yet still spewing invective about her long-dead philandering husband. We see immediately that contempt for men is a well-practiced art in this family line. The film includes some rather whimsical flights of fantasy and one particularly humorous one occurs at the mother’s funeral. Danielle has a vision of her grandmother sitting up in her coffin and singing “My Blue Heaven” in English, while a statue of Jesus winks in the background.

As life proceeds in their new setting, Antonia and Danielle meet and assume responsibility for a widely varied cast of the town’s misfits. There is the Russian Olga who runs the café, is an undertaker, and a midwife. In this idealized feminist vision of the world, women do everything that is important to life and death. Farmer Bas (Jan Decleir) is attracted to Antonia, though hardly her equal in intelligence or confidence. One day he tells her that his five sons need a mother. Antonia replies, matter-of-factly, “But I don’t need your sons.” Males are generally not needed in Antonia’s world, except for chores, sexual or otherwise. Antonia refuses Bas her hand, but tells him that he can have the rest of her (once a week is enough), provided that he will build a little cottage by the stream for their trysts so as not to cause “all that confusion” in her house or his. He willingly obliges.

Then, there’s Crooked Finger (Mil Seghers). He is a morose, misanthropic hermit but also a genius, who studies Schopenhauer and Nietzsche without ever leaving his room. Later he tutors Antonia’s precocious and brilliant granddaughter, Therese. Crooked Finger’s dour view of life derives from his belief in its emptiness and futility. He is convinced that there is no life after death, God is dead (if he ever existed), and all hope is wasted!

There are two retarded individuals taken in by Antonia: Deedee (Marina de Graaf), who is tormented and finally raped by her own brother, and the gentle Loony Lips (Jan Steen). Another pair of misfits are Mad Madonna, a Catholic who bays at the full moon, and The Protestant, who wildly loves Mad Madonna but can’t marry her because she’s Catholic. There is also a Priest who feels great sympathy for an unwed mother of two, Letta, and wants nothing more, in his compassion, than to alleviate her depressed circumstances. He ultimately rips off his clerical collar, proclaiming “I am free”, marries Letta, and, with her, produces ten more good Catholic children.

Danielle goes to art school, becomes a painter, and returns to her mother’s farm. She declares, one day that she wants to have a child but has no interest in taking on a husband. The ever flexible Antonia lines up the brother of an old friend to provide dispassionate stud service – with the understanding that he will then disappear from their lives forever. The product of this arrangement is Therese, and this matrilineal family thus continues into another generation. Danielle later falls in love with Lara (Elsie de Brauw), a lesbian and Therese’s first school teacher.

Therese is a precocious genius and her education is duly facilitated by Crooked Finger. She gets raped by one of the town’s bad guys, which leads to swift and decisive retribution – at the initiative of the women, of course. Therese has a baby, Sarah, from this circumstance, once again continuing this remarkable lineage without the trouble of a husband. Therese becomes a mathematician at a university, but her love life is thwarted by her inability to find a guy who is her intellectual equal. She finally opts, like her grandmother, for a man who is clearly no match for her – a childhood friend who worships the very ground on which she walks. At least he’ll be there for sex!

Matriarchy and Male Bashing: Since one of my hobbies is genealogy, I am especially aware of the inherent gender-bias that exists conventionally in family lines, where the surname of the father is the one typically passed on to the children. For a genealogist, it has the practical consequence of making it much more difficult to research maternal heritage than the male lines. In Antonia’s Line, the usual situation is turned topsy-turvy as daughters beget daughters.

This film is controversial in relation to the stridency of Gorris’ brand of feminism. I read reviews that range from one that accuses Gorris of blatant male-bashing, one that suggests that there is a little of that, and still another that argues that the male-bashing charge is an insupportable lie. The first time that I saw this film, I knew nothing of Gorris’ background and had no assumptions about its content. I watched it, enjoyed it, but did not, as a male viewer, feel put upon by Gorris’ work.

To some extent, most films have the potential to be viewed as bashing – one group or another. If a film has one or more villains and the villains have any gender, racial, or ethnic identity, one could make a case that each such negative character diminishes in a tiny way the general esteem for the corresponding group or groups. Every Korean thug or Nazi madman that appears in a film subtly affects the way viewers think about Koreans or Germans. On the other hand, we really don’t want film makers relying exclusively on genderless, race-less, and ethnically unidentifiable characters. Gorris, because of her feminism, has chosen to film a story in which strong women of great inner beauty thrive largely without men and where the men are either villains, retarded, or subordinates limited to the periphery of the women’s lives. This is not the battle of the sexes that we’re watching in Antonio’s Line, but postwar liberation – an idealized feminist society dominated by women where men are mainly reduced to the role of fathering children or providing occasional sex. It’s not an elevating view of men by any means, but no different in kind than selecting any other demographic group to play the heavies in a particular film.

Men (Farmer Daan and his sons, especially), in Gorris’ conception, perpetrate all that is evil, out of unmitigated meanness, from brutal rapes to the ignorant bullying of disabled girls. Women, on the other hand, have all of the talent, whether in art (Danielle) or mathematics (Therese), are unable to find men of equal capacity to pair up with, and must even take responsibility for exacting retribution against male transgressions. It is a bleak but entertaining anthem to feminism, empowering of women if demeaning to men. My view is that there is bashing going on here, but it really doesn’t matter. One group gets bashed in this film, another group in some other film. It all comes out in the wash!

Other Thought-provoking Themes: Gorris does not reserve her scorn exclusively for men; she has enough to spare for religion as well! We see that Gorris pointedly rejects the intolerance of the Catholic church because it stands in the way of happiness that could have been. Mad Madonna is denied marriage to The Protestant despite their mutual desire and The Priest cannot rescue Letta without leaving the priesthood. Gorris also rejects the view of death propagated by religions. On the other hand, she similarly rejects the nihilistic views represented by Crooked Finger. She offers a third alternative based on the simple idea of death as return to nature – the body becoming the nutrients for growth of new life. Antonia’s mother bitterly fights death to the end because her religion failed to prepare her properly; Antonia chooses the time of her death because she is fully reconciled.

Weaknesses: The main weakness in this film is the lack of real plot. What we have here mainly is a series of events or vignettes, but with no driving force. Antonia’s Line reinforces once again that a series of events does not constitute a plot. There is also an over-reliance on the narrative, which is a kind of cheap substitute for exposition through action and dialogue.

The Bottom Line: Antonia’s Line is rated R for sex, violence, and nudity and has a running time of 93 minutes. The cinematography in this film is quite lovely, with all that scenic Dutch countryside to exploit. What we have here is a skillful mix of comedy, drama, tragedy and romance. Antonia’s Line is a life-affirming film about female empowerment, where women take responsibility for their own lives. It is also a film about tolerance and community. Antonia teaches us how to look for what is good in each person, however eccentric or limited that person might be. The film returns over and over again to the long outdoor dinner table in Antonia’s farmyard, where community spirit is realized in the communal dinners. It is thus entirely appropriate that the film concludes with Sarah’s vision of all the past and present misfit residents, gathering together once again at that table.


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

The Assault
Character
Soldier of Orange
The Vanishing

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age