‘Antonia’s’ Director Has One Dream Come True

“I consider my films a bit like dreams,” director Marleen Gorris says. “Maybe you could call the first three closer to nightmares, as opposed to this one, which is more like a pleasant daydream. . . .”

“This one” is “Antonia’s Line,” an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film, a winner of multiple honors at film festivals (including best film at Toronto and best director in the Hamptons) and the Netherlands’ favorite home-grown film of the year.

No daydream, the film is remarkable for a number of reasons, including the fact that its director was also responsible for the notorious “A Question of Silence,” her uncompromising debut film of 1982 about three women who are tried for murder after stomping to death a male store owner who accuses them of shoplifting. She had originally brought her script to Chantal Ackerman, who suggested Gorris direct it herself. She did. Intended to worry the complacent male, it did.

But “Antonia’s Line”--whose title character, a woman of fierce independence and will, mothers a matriarchy of illegitimate, right-minded females--is almost bucolic in its portrayal of a world in balance. There is evil, to be sure, and it begins and ends with the male. But at the same time “Antonia’s Line” is a film that will find favor with both women and men.

Well, most of them, anyway. Some have managed to ferret out an anti-male agenda even in a film as all-embracing as this.

“Very few actually,” Gorris said, “because I don’t think it’s true. They get treated very well, actually. Yes, if you have a bad guy, you treat him badly. But that kind of reaction to me seems to be a defense by some men. I imagine they’re used to seeing films that have men as main characters. When they’re not the main character, they get uncomfortable.”

In “Antonia’s Line” men are strictly peripheral. Antonia, played by noted Dutch film star Willeke van Ammelrooy, is larger-than-life, super-maternal and something of a fantasy figure, given her time and place--which is the Netherlands after World War II. She is returning to her hometown with a daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), having survived the war (although we’re not told how). What she encounters, and virtually upends, is a village ethos that is oppressively patriarchal, cruel in its callousness and stupid in its cruelty. The influence of Antonia and her line is therapeutic and enlightening. The message is obvious.

Gorris, a handsome woman with a quick, dry wit, spoke by phone from Seattle, where her film had opened that city’s film festival (and got “half a standing ovation”). She wrote the script in 1988, but because of the usual hurdles--money and a game of musical producers--it was several years before she got it on screen.

“The first producer wanted to do the film with too little money,” she said, “and I couldn’t agree to that; I thought it would do the film in. The second producer thought maybe it was a good idea to try and make it in English because then we might get it financed. But he didn’t work very hard on it. And the third producer thought it might be a good idea to make a co-production of it because in Europe if you have a co-production with three or more countries, you also qualify for a bit of European money. And that clinched it.”

They raised just enough, she said: in U.S. currency, about $2.7 million. “It doesn’t sound like all that much, but for Dutch standards it was rather a lot,” she said. “But that’s why it took so long. And while the producers were busy trying to get the money, I did another film and a TV series of five short pieces.”

Those projects were “The Last Island,” an English-language feature about plane-crash survivors, and “Tales of the Street,” the televised short series. In 1984 she directed “Broken Mirrors,” another harrowing tale of male oppression that cross-cuts between two women working in an Amsterdam brothel and a housewife who’s been taken captive by a serial killer. Nice stuff. Not bucolic.

“ ‘A Question of Silence’ and the other films I’ve made are what I’d call city films,” the director said. “And they are very much indictments against things in society that I don’t like.

“ ‘Antonia’s Line’ is very different. It’s not a linear story, and it is much different in scope. I grew up in the country in the south of Holland, and that’s what inspired me to make the film. It’s not in the least bit autobiographical, but I don’t think that someone who grew up in a city could ever have made a film like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to them.”

To make “Antonia’s Line,” Gorris was racing the clock, to a degree: Had she not begun filming by the autumn of ‘94, the financing would have fallen out from under her. Subsidies would have expired; other financing would have been pulled. Time was of the essence.

And it is in the film as well. “I wanted to give it scope, if that’s the right word for it, a real span of time,” she said. “Also, there’s the sense that time seems to get warped somewhat. At the beginning Antonia gets up from bed as an old woman and decides it’s her time to die. From there, the whole film is a flashback. Then you’re suddenly where you were at the beginning and her great-granddaughter Sarah is there, and she turns out to be the voice-over of the movie--which technically is impossible because she’s simply too young.

“So these things are sort of playing around with time and almost giving time a voice,” she said. “That was something I wanted to do, partly because of growing older myself.”

Gorris, 47, admits that “Antonia’s Line,” with all its universal harmony and strict sense of decency and right, is utopian and more than a little bit fantastic. “But I don’t find realism all that interesting,” she said. “It does limit you.”