2/10
This movie is an insult to women, cancer-patients and proper film making
13 June 2010
Warning: Spoilers
This is the movie of the famous Dutch book 'komt een vrouw bij de dokter'. The book describes the true events that the author (Kluun) experienced when his wive is diagnosed with breast cancer that eventually takes her life.

First of all, this movie is as dull as a one-in-a-thousand soap operas on TV. Second, the main character is unsympathetic. You cannot make a movie around someone you cannot identify with. You can try, but only few directors can pull off such a thing. Reinout Oerlemans surely can not.

The movie tries to be dramatic, but never even comes close to real drama. Its almost slapstick. For example the scene where Carmed hears about her illness from the doctor conveys no drama or emotion at all! Its also rushed into the movie. No character built-up, no nothing.

The main character is a person you cannot have sympathy for. His wive gets cancer, he can't handle it and runs away. He cheated on his wife when she was still healthy, so he surely cheats on his wife when she gets sick. He is an asshole, but his wife is even more stupid because she likes him no matter what.

The movie only revolves around Stijn, his wife Carmen is actually a card-board persona that has no depth at all. All her decisions remain unexplained, yet she is the one dealing with a cheating husband, and cancer. We must make notice here that the book only tells Stijns version of the story. Carmen is dead so we cannot ask her anything. Kluun (the author of the book) cleverly left out all that is interesting.

In the end of the movie Carmen dies and I liked it. She deserved not to live in my opinion. Stijn deserves his wife dying on him, because he never really cared about her in the first place. His wife dead, makes sure he cannot harm her even more. He never loved his wife, I can tell you that. The author even tries to make money out of her death by writing a self-indulged book and trying to sell his whining and his childish behavior. This man never deserved his book being turned into a proper film, I am glad it didn't.

I know people that have been in the same position as Stijn, and they did not behave like this animal in the first place. They did not write silly books trying to get the attention of the mass-public: "look me, I am pathetic. My wife has cancer, look me. Look me, my wife has cancer, I am pathetic, shall we have sex?".

The only interesting parts in this movie were the sex-scenes. As traditional Dutch cinema describes, this movie contains a lot of unnecessary nude-scenes that funny enough contain a lot of breasts. Carice "Look my breasts" van Houten does what she does: flash her breasts, like she does in all her movies. Really weird. I hope they make a porn movie out of this one, because that version will automatically have more story-line than this 'work of art'.

Instead of crying, I was laughing at the end of the movie. I was bored and was glad this movie was over. The book was better than the movie because it had a little more dept. The author however, in my opinion is a criminal that deserves none of all the attention he gets.
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