DUTCH FILM LINKS WAR MEMORIES

Forty years later, World War II remains a primary life experience and perhaps the primary life experience for, I suppose, half the world’s population.

The bloodlettings have slowed but never quite stopped in one corner of the globe or another. But the Second World War has a haunting persistence and continues to be re-examined in works of fact and fiction.

One of the subtlest explorations I’ve seen of the war’s persistence is “The Assault,” by the Dutch director Fons Rademakers. Based on a novel by Harry Mulisch, it is the Dutch entry in the foreign language category of the Academy Awards. (Whether it is one of the five nominees will be known at dawn on Wednesday.)

Rademakers, who was recently in Los Angeles, was born in 1920 and was a student at the Amsterdam Academy of Dramatic Art, aiming to be an actor and director, at the start of the war. He was drafted into the Dutch army, captured by the Germans and briefly interned as a prisoner of war.

But, he says, actors were regarded as unthreatening and he was released to return to the theater. In 1943 he was arrested by a consortium of SS men and German and Amsterdam policemen on charges of concealing Jews at his house (as indeed, Rademakers says, he had been doing.)

He was let go when the burgemeester intervened on his behalf, but a few days later the Amsterdam police woke him in the middle of the night and tipped him off that the Gestapo was going to arrest him again. He fled to Switzerland and spent the rest of the war in Geneva.

“The Assault” is set in 1945 in a small Dutch city where Resistance workers kill a local collaborationist. The body is lugged from where it fell to the walk in front of a nearby house, whose occupants, except for a 12-year-old boy, are executed by the Germans in reprisal.

The film follows the boy (Marc van Uchelen) from the traumatic events of the assault into a troubled manhood (the adult Anton is played by Derek de Lint). He has become, quite symbolically, an anesthesiologist, as if by profession to remove not only the pain of his memories but the memories themselves.

Except that the past will not lay quiet. It is in this case a solution that pursues the reluctant detective, a mystery whose clues will not remain hidden. Who had moved the corpse and, so doing, doomed the boy’s older brother and parents, and why? Who was the doomed woman with whom the boy shared the detention cell? What did the war do to the surviving adults, the other surviving children?

“A Belgian poet-novelist friend told me about the novel,” Rademakers says. “I read the galleys and was very impressed. But at first I was still not sure. I prefer to do my own things.”

But the power of the story got to him. “I liked all the layers, all the accidents that disclose the links between the present and the past, all the questions of guilt and innocence, all the confusions of who is good and who is not, who is spared and who is not.”

Like a good mystery, “The Assault” is full of surprises and unexpected interludes, a kind German soldier, a denouement that reveals an agonizing moral choice made under duress, the then-and-now glimpses of several characters in addition to the protagonist, all variously pursued and shaped by their shared past.

Rademakers got his financing for the film from Cannon, just in time to take advantage of a massive anti-nuclear demonstration in Amsterdam. He placed De Lint as the mature Anton in the middle of the throng with his daughter. “You can’t give up a chance for 600,000 extras,” Rademakers says.

The sequence concludes “The Assault” on a note of what might be called contemplative melancholy, asking protagonist and viewer to think upon the persistence equally of family and folly, good and evil, fear and hope.

Rademakers, who went to Rome and became an assistant to Vittorio de Sica in the early ‘50s and also worked with Jean Renoir, won an Oscar nomination for his first feature, “Village on the River,” in 1958. “Max Havelaar” in 1977 has been his biggest success in the U.S. until now. At present he is preparing a film based on a novel, “An Instant in the Wind,” about the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa in the 1750s, a part of the backdrop to the present turmoil.