The Matterhorn – also the name of the bitter-sweet comedy screening at the Tel Aviv LGBT International Film Festival – is a notoriously impregnable mountain on the Swiss/Italy border. It also offers amazing vistas, even if just partially conquered. It demands courage, optimism, a sunny disposition to life.
Not quite the qualities one would associate with Fred, a widower and pensioner in a small community in the Dutch countryside. Fred leads an unimpeachably proper life – unspeakably dull life, one might say. Church on Sunday, for invocations of order, obedience and submission; dinner every evening at six, plain and unadorned. Choral music occasionally, Bach, possessing more emotional heft with Fred than one might expect. There’s a picture on the wall that faces him every evening, a woman and child. There’s a tragedy buried deeply in his past, one surmises. The woman in the picture is Trudy, his late wife, killed in an accident. They visited the Matterhorn together once. The memory, like much else of his life, is preserved in aspic, locked in the past.
One day, a strange drifter called Theo turns up at his door. Theo is monosyllabic, has an unusually tender connection to animals, and the innocence and guile of a child. He clearly does not fit in with everyday life, most certainly not Fred’s restrained life of order. But despite himself, Fred takes him in. There is something in Theo that recalls Fred’s past.
Once one embarks on the roller-coaster of spontaneity, there’s no point trying to disembark in a hurry. A chance encounter in a supermarket – Theo, mimicking a sheep, strikes up a friendship with a little girl – opens up an unexpected career opportunity as children’s entertainers, at birthday parties for the small children of the bourgeois. It’s as far removed from the Fred’s Calvinist propriety as one can imagine. Or to be more precise, as far removed as the propriety of his small community as they can imagine. Kamps, an unfriendly neighbour, invokes the threat of damnation upon Fred, small children suggest more than a hint of impropriety in the relationship between Fred and Theo. It’s not so much about them, though; much more the threat difference poses to the stability and predictability of the community.
Matterhorn, directed by Diederik Ebbing and starring Ton Kas and Rene van ’t Hof as Fred and Theo, is underpinned by a perhaps predictable cliché but nonetheless draws the viewer in. The tensions between the cloistered repression close by and the unexplored potential of the wider world always sits heavily on Fred. Theo, unencumbered by the inconveniences of embarrassment and social pressure, permits him to make the transition from one to the other. As we follow Fred from the countryside to a gay cabaret Amsterdam, and tries to convince himself to visit the Matterhorn once more, it becomes pretty obvious early on that the film will pivot on Fred’s capacity to let himself go. Plot details are occasionally thin, but principals, Kas and Hof as Fred and Theo, make Matterhorn both watchable and affecting, an amusingly enjoyable film but with a ever-so-slightly cynical edge. We never choose who we are or what we become, most of the time. But we can, as Theo shows Fred, at least try to make the most of the hand that life dealt us.
Matterhorn will be screened at the TLVFest on Saturday, June 14th. Tickets may be ordered via this link: http://www.tlvfest.com/en/?p=3629
Matterhorn (2013)
Written and Directed by Diederik Ebbinge
Starring Ton Kas, Rene van ’t Hof, Porgy Franssen
87 minutes, Dutch with English and Hebrew subtitles
