May 6th Reviews

You have probably never heard of him but Pim Fortuyn was one of most notorious Dutch politician from the last 50 years. Indeed, suddenly, masses of people who never cared about Politics before became fanatically infatuated with this guy (my wife is one of those) whereas the other part of the Dutch population really despised him for his demagogic style and the way he manipulated the frustrations of the average Dutch man and woman (I personally belonged to this 2nd group). Basically, back then he was one of the only politicians who said exactly what the people wanted to hear (You are fed up with the foreigners? Let’s get rid off them! You are fed up with the taxes! Let’s get rid off them! You are fed up with schools/hospitals/whatever? Let’ s get rid off them!). In my opinion, the appeal was that he gave some very simple answers to some very complex issues. Anyway, to make things even more dramatic, just before he was about to make an historical victory at the elections and probably become prime minister, the guy was shot. And you thought that such things only happened in the USA… As a result, he became some kind of martyr and we will eventually never find out if he was indeed the new messiah or just full of sh*t. Anyway, this movie is about this fatal day when he was killed and the makers basically developed some conspiracy theories about what might have happened or not. It is obviously quite reminiscent of ‘JFK’ even though it never reaches the level of Oliver Stone’s movie. Indeed, some ideas worked or some others didn’t and there were maybe a little too many sub-plots. The weird thing is that the director of this movie, Theo van Gogh (yeah, the great-grand-son of Vincent’s brother) was also killed in some political execution even before this movie was released… Indeed, those were dark days for the Dutch community. To conclude, even though it is not really amazing, I thought it was a really interesting thriller and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Dutch movies.