MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘TRACKS IN THE SNOW’ IS A DUTCH TREAT

Imagine a trek film with a Cain and Abel theme, framed as a vaudeville turn, and you’ll have a rough idea of Orlow Seunke’s imaginative and captivating “Tracks in the Snow” (at the Fox International).

“Tracks” is the third film at the Fox to star Dutch actor Gerard Thoolen and the second directed by Seunke. Clearly, both are major talents; it is not too much to say that Seunke, who’s also Dutch, is one of today’s most original young film makers, while Thoolen surely ranks among Europe’s greatest screen actors.

Thoolen plays Simon, a seedy cabaret artist who receives a telegram notifying him of his father’s impending death. Because of Simon’s homosexuality, his father disowned him years before, but now there’s the hope of a deathbed reconciliation. It comes much to the consternation of Simon’s rich and thoroughly unscrupulous older brother Hein (Bram van der Vlugt, wonderfully baleful and oily). With great reluctance and uneasiness, Hein joins his long-estranged brother on the journey to the bedside of their father, dying in a remote, snowy village in an unnamed country.

As in his first feature, “A Taste of Water,” Seunke (who writes his scripts with Dirk Ayelt Kooiman) proves to be a master at exploring and illuminating complex and ambiguous relationships. By the time the brothers board a covered wagon to bury their father in the even more remote location he has picked, their trek across a snowy wildernesshas become an odyssey into the human soul.

“Tracks in the Snow” (Times-rated: Mature) is at the same time a very funny and entertaining film with a keen sense of the comically absurd--there’s no Bergmanesque solemnity here. Seunke allows his film to become very gratifying indeed as we watch Simon, so seemingly vulnerable in his effeminacy and even naivete, begin to get the upper hand over his evil brother by innate goodness--and by the sheer courage and resilience he has always needed simply to survive as a gay in a hostile society. But Seunke isn’t interested in revenge, sweet as it may be, but in considering from a much larger perspective the mysterious, miraculous workings of love and forgiveness that emerge as two individuals become engaged in a struggle for survival.

Seunke’s vision has a sense of discovery so fresh that he gets away with everything. The symbolism of that civil war, grim as it is, doesn’t hang heavily over the proceedings because Seunke shows, deftly, that the brothers are too preoccupied to pay much attention to it, beyond regarding it as a nuisance. And Seunke is so confident and daring that his treating the brothers’ story as one of Simon’s vaudeville turns doesn’t seem pretentious but instead a deft touch, allowing the film maker to suggest that all human experience is ultimately enigmatic. When you consider the richness of “Tracks in the Snow’s” meaning, humor and originality you realize there’s not much more you could ask of a film.

Plump and balding, Thoolen is unglamorous yet enormously appealing through the combined impact of his warmth, intelligence, passion--and a personality considerably more expansive than his waistline. Not since Klaus Maria Brandauer electrified international audiences in “Mephisto” has a European actor possessed so commanding a presence on the screen.

‘TRACKS IN THE SNOW’

A Spring Films-IHC release of a Maya production. Producers Orlow Seunke, Jan Musch, Tijs Tinergen. Director Orlow Seunke. Screenplay Seunke, Dirk Ayelt Kooiman. Camera Theo Bierkens. Music Maarten Koopman. Art director Misjel Vermeiren. Costumes An Verhoeven. Film editors Orlow Seunke, Dorith Vinken. With Gerard Thoolebn, Bram van Vlugt, Melle van Essen, Jan Willem Hees. In Dutch, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.