Friday, September 5, 2014

A Dutch fable in animation


While our class were discussing one's youngest happy memories in the garden at De Kas last night,  I couldn't stop thinking about a short animated film called Father & Daughter that I had seen earlier at the Eye (Amsterdam's film museum). I froze for a second at the museum because upon entering the Panorama, a roomful of incredible film strips that cover the walls from top to bottom, I immediately realized the signature scene from Father & Daughter with the lonesome girl on her bike. This film was randomly picked to be played on the educational channel in Vietnam in the early 2000s and I remember tearing up every time I saw it, which was approximately three to four times a day. Vietnamese television blatantly cut the final credits so I never knew what the film was called or where it originated from, and over time the memory slowly faded until it came up on one of the hundreds of screens in the Panaroma and I froze. That was it! It was my anonymous favorite film and one of my earliest happy memories of tearing up after seeing something beautiful.

The film starts with a farewell scene between a daughter and her father. The music theme, Iosif Ivanovici's The Danube Waves, elevates the wistful scene. The reason for the father's departure is not revealed. It could be war, a new job in a foreign place or a new family. All we knew is his hesitation before stepping on the boat. He runs back uphill to give his girl one final hug, then leaves. The depiction of the father is simply a towering cloak over the tiny girl, enough to symbolize the sort of protection and sureness a father figure is supposed to provide. Except that in this case, the cloak recedes into the horizon on a fragile boat, heading for an unknown destination and leaving the bereft daughter behind. 


The Dutch landscape with its eternal row of trees and floating clouds changes as the music plays on in different tempos, signifying the change in season. The girl grows taller, maturing into a young high school student and the sombre atmosphere of the beginning subsides. Yet day in day out, she would still stop by the spot on the riverside where her father left, waiting as if he might come back any time. Time passes and now we see her adorably sitting on the back of a young man's bike. They still stop at the same place so she can look out into the horizon. They marry, have kids and once again, come to the riverside. Her husband dutifully watches the kids play while she stands alone on the small hill, looking over the river. Her search for the father is ritualized and no matter how old she grows, coming to the river and simply gazing ahead has become a sort of desperate routine.



A close-up of the rolling bicycle returns and we understand that time continues to flow on. The little woman is now old, her back bent forward on her slow bike as she struggles to bike against the wind back to the same old riverside. She makes it to the spot, tries to use the kickstand to hold the bike up but it falls. She tries again, it falls again, and she gives up and heads straight to the river, leaving the bike lying in its forlornness on the hill. The bike signifies the aging process of the human, once young and robust, now rusty and fallen.


The river has now dried up and is covered in grass so high it looms over the old woman's tiny posture. She disappears into the grass until she arrives at a large circular area in the middle of the river. It is a flat surface of soil and a part of a sunken boat is seen jutting out from below the ground. The woman lies down next to the inside of the boat, curls up into a fetal position and closes her eyes. The boat is the only remnant of her father and sleeping within its protective embrace offers a strange sense of consolation.


At this point, some might guess that the film ends with the theme of death and separation but Dutch-British writer and director Michael Dudok de Wit anticipates our expectation and gives us something else. The woman wakes up from her sleep and enters an almost dreamlike sequence. She stands up and starts walking forward, faster and faster until she is now running. The wonderful thing about this sequence is that she also becomes younger with each step. She stops suddenly and the father appears before her, wearing the same coat he had when he left her years ago. They look at each other for a moment of recognition, shock and elation, then the young daughter runs up and holds her father the way she used to do when she was a little girl. 


The final scene is moving in its very impossibility. We harbor a doubt that the father is a fragment of the woman's hallucination but the filmmaker convinces us that this is a believable ending. A paternal, or generally speaking, a familial connection that rewinds and transcends reality takes us to an otherworldly realm where we can freely stretch the limits of time and existence. The Danube Waves' melody closes the reunion scene with a classic fade to black, leaving us feeling like we have just watched a fable animated in sepia. The animation was done just right, sparse yet expressive in each of its representation of the setting sun, a lone bird or a thin bicycle track on the snow-covered road. The film did deservingly win the 2000 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, but even if you do not believe in the Academy, chances are that you would still appreciate this beautifully-done animation about time and the joy as well as loss of family. Do give Father & Daughter a try if you haven't.

(Quick tip: it is screened for free at the Eye in one of those yellow pods down in the basement. Another reason why this museum rocks.)

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